Melospiza

Under the leaf canopy

2012-01-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

M. has had this philosophy, probably forever although it only came to my irritated attention about two years ago, that a person is healthier in well-appointed surroundings. Okay, the term he uses is "less cluttered." Or sometimes "less crammed with useless stuff." But the solution always involves a purchase and several weekends of deep cleaning. So I tend to be a little...skeptical...when he proposes that the cure for a family member's problems is a trip to World Market or American Furniture or, now that the big blue-and-yellow box store has opened, IKEA.

However, I'll be damned if Helen wasn't stuffed up and whiny and feverish and snuffly for WEEKS (at least two) and then the evening we brought home the new American Furniture bed she started to improve and by the time we bought and installed the new desk, the shelves, and the (admittedly to-die-for adorable) leaf canopy thingie she got completely over whatever it is and is back to her usual cheerful self. So there. Apparently money can buy happiness, at least of the first grade sort.

Her room has ever been a design conundrum. It's the smallest room in the house except perhaps for the bathroom, and it has an unfortunate tunnel shape accentuated by the fact that the only practical place to locate the bed is along one wall. Add a bureau or a desk, and you have a cramped hallway to nowhere. Plus--how shall we put this--Helen has the property-amassing instinct of a monopoly addict. Or a found-object artist. Stuff accumulates. Clothes and dolls and furniture and books, as you might expect, plus art projects and other projects and boxes of which projects may someday be made; drawings by friends; drawings for friends; drawings by stuffed animals for the friends of stuffed animals. Bags with things. Boxes with things. Old forgotten backpacks of things once packed for a trip to the mountains or a trip to the zoo or a trip to nowhere. Stuff.

Which is why I was (and still am, some) skeptical that a few hundred dollars applied at the proper furniture retailers would really make a long-term difference.

Nevertheless, her room looks 100% less tunnellike and 80% more calming and it is a pleasure to poke my head in and watch her sleeping under her leaf canopy with her turtle star nightlight lamp lighting the ceiling.

Not that it wasn't one of my favorite ways to calm down before, looking in on her and her galumphing older brother (although he's such a late-to-bed-er that it's more of a thing to calm me in the morning, except most mornings it isn't calming at all--GET UP!!! The bus leaves in fifteen minutes!!!) as they sleep. Now it's that much more calming, in that it doesn't involve icky notes to self about reMINDing her to CLEAN HER ROOM tomorrow.

In other retail news, I finally took my laundry to the drycleaning and if that doesn't sound like news to you that's because you haven't moved that damn bag of three (3) drycleaning items from House 2 to House 3 through Construction Project 1 to Construction Project 2 to Asbestos Nightmare to Garage-in-Kitchen to Construction Project 3 and back again. And after all that, it cost $30 which is more than I'd pay for two of the three items new, so after this it will be tumble dry low until they attain shapelessness.

Next time: tunnel before and after.

Drinking the Spanish

2012-01-19T21:12:00.000-07:00

You know what's so funny? When you're browsing for airline tickets on the web and you've got five different browser windows open and so when you think you're buying the one that departs your airport at 5:00 pm on the day you want to leave, which would be perfect, it actually turns out you bought the one that leaves your airport at 1:00. In the a.m. Hahahahahahahahahahaha kill me.

It's been that kind of a week so far.

What I was going to write about, before I got distracted by Horribly Bad Decisions, was learning, and learning styles, and subject matter, and how as doggedly and lovingly you may lead the horse to the fountain of, say, Spanish, you can't make it drink. Not even if you promise it 100 carrots for every semester it earns at least a B average in the class.

Once upon a time, Silas said, "WHY do I NEED to learn to ski?"

Which is another way of saying we got the middle school registration material last week and Silas has broken my heart by refusing to take a single semester of language, let alone the rigorous two-semester course that I have been holding in my head as the last best chance for him to learn Spanish. This has been been my dream since before he was born, that he (and my other as-yet unimagined children) would be given the gift of fluency in another language.

I knew it would be tricky, since I am not fluent in another language myself, but I was optimistic in the way it's possible to be when you're pregnant and your child-to-be can be absolutely anything. And we began well: Silas had the great good luck (in the opinion of his parents) to go to kindergarten and first grade at a bilingual immersion school, and by the time we had to move (WEEPING), he had a pretty good understanding of spoken Spanish and an awesome accent. And, unfortunately, a lifelong distaste for the language itself and anything associated with it (even restaurants. For REAL. Oh my heart, you break again.)

Now he says, "What's the snow like?"

Nevertheless, I persisted in halfheartedly trying to Keep the Spanish Alive in his head, if not his heart. And I tried not to be too much of a pushy parent about it: he hated it. I got that. Nevertheless, you don't let a kid not learn to read just because it's hard and he doesn't like it, right? You keep at it. So I kept at it.

And here we are: his first chance since first grade to take a real Spanish class, in which he might actually learn something, and LO. The forces of darkness have won out and he is opting for art/PE instead.

Unless the 100 carrots a semester move him (and they might. That's a pretty good deal for a kid who earns $5 for mowing the lawn).

Meanwhile, I have been forced to do a little parental soul searching. Back when Si was prekindergarten and we were on tenterhooks about the school lottery chances, I asked myself where I wanted him to go with this. I knew that teaching him a foreign language could easily have the consequence of raising a child who moves to Chile the first chance he gets and never comes back. Ouch. But I could live with that, I told myself, if he was fluent.

I also asked myself a harder question: if he, knock on wood, god forbid, nononono, did not live to be an adult, would I regret him not learning Spanish? And the answer to that was no. Not in the way I'd regret it if he never went camping or never read The Hobbit or never saw the Midwestern woods in spring. Spanish is a skill I want him to have as an adult--and now that I'm out of the fanaticism of pregnancy, I am able to admit that there are many ways to become fluent. Yeah, it's great if you learn it as a child. But I know plenty of fluent adults who did not learn the language(s) of their fluency until they were young adults (or even not-so-young adults).

Which brings us to deeper parental soul searching. such as: what do we decide to teach our kids, anyway, and how important is it that they Follow the Plan?

For example, we teach kids to swim (even if they haaaate the water) so they don't drown. We teach them to read and do math so that they can earn a living. We teach them how to make baklava because it is delicious (if you like honey, that is. And nuts.). Learning Spanish falls somewhere between learning to read and learning to make baklava. And, I guess, it's like learning to swim, on the odd chance that you get kidnapped by Catalinian pirates and your only hope of survival is to overhear their whispered conversations about where the escape hatch is.

Yes, learning another language is an Important Part of a Good Education. Essential, even. And so often neglected. But...there is an element of personal taste (honey and nuts? what if you prefer lemon?), not to mention the ever so tiny issue that it's actually impossible to be really fluent without sufficient motivation to open your mouth and communicate with somebody else. (That was the beauty of the immersion school. The motivation was built in.)

So, for the unmotivated student (which we most certainly have)...what, really, is the best way to ensure he learns to speak?

I'm not sure--I'm thinking something along the lines of extensive travel/ living in another country, preferably by himself-- probably it isn't sitting in a class for 38 minutes a day learning hablo hablas habla.

Sigh. That's really hard for me to admit, especially since the chances of him going off to live in another country by himself anytime soon are slim to negative 15. And I still think that the chances of him becoming fluent in another language are greatly increased if he takes some actual Spanish classes. But--oh, ow, sadness--if he decides to not to, it is not the end of the world.

Science project. Involves projectiles, naturally. Too bad they don't offer Spanish PE.

The evening I came to this realization, with a heavy, heavy heart, I was reminded about how Silas does learn. It's not by memorizing verb endings--routine rote memorization, the backbone of my own educative process, is not really in his repertoire. No. He and M. were putting together our new IKEA shelves and he was talking through the process, noticing when where there needed to be screws or reinforcements, figuring out what each little piece did, and describing it all (and noticing immediately when something wasn't working or there was some minute piece missing or mis-set). He learns by doing, and he learns by solving problems to which he wants to know the answer. If learning Spanish were to enable him to solve a problem to which he wanted to know the answer, he'd learn it. He'd curl up on the couch moaning every 45 minutes or so, but he'd learn it.

So my mission, if I choose to accept it, is to devise a problem to which the answer is: learn Spanish.

Perhaps I can arrange for him to be kidnapped by Catalinian pirates.

Helen's latest photo series: the Rockies fans among us.

At the very least, I can try to cultivate in him a sense of his own adventurousness, so that when I casually say, his junior year in high school or so, that eh, he really probably wouldn't want to do a year in Costa Rica or anything, he can break in with an indignant, "Of COURSE I want to spend a year in Costa Rica! I'm adventurous!"

Adventurous like taking the overnight plane through Charlotte just because. It's an adventurrrrr.

The long-awaited TBR post

2012-01-13T10:28:00.001-07:00

I'm fully aware that the only one who has long awaited this post is me, but too bad. It's my blog, I'll bore when I want to.

So! My personal TBR Pile Challenge! (The real TBR Pile Challenge from roofbeamreader can be found here.) A quick rundown of the rules:

1. The book must have been in my house at least one full year.

2. The book must be previously unread by me.

3. All books must be completed by December 31, 2012.

The real TBR Challenge involves 12 books, but requiring myself to read so many books at home crimps my library-borrowing style, and library borrowing is one of my few certain pleasures in life that doesn't cost money and doesn't involve the consumption of butter and flour -- so, six books.

So, without further ado, my TBR Pile Challenge Books for 2012 are:

1. The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Bernard DeVoto
2. Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose
3. The Ohio Frontier, R. Douglas Hurt
4. Democracy in America, Alexis de Toqueville, abridged and with an introduction by Thomas Bender
5. The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
6. Drosscape, Alan Berger

You may note a certain theme. A certain level of... chewiness. A possible, er, reason these all were abandoned not long after being started, or bought, or picked up off the departmental free table back when I was part of a department. Nevertheless: six. I can do six books squeezed in between reads that require less effort.

It actually helps that we have a theme going. I'm a themey kind of reader. I will forge my way through the falling-off cover and creatively abysmal spelling and maddening uncertainty about daily location of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, and invigorated and refreshed, I will stretch and hop to the next book, Undaunted Courage, which will feel like a candy-covered romp in comparison, plus I have faith it will have maps for dummies. Then I'll reach backward a little, explore the Ohio frontier, all the time wishing I could hop in the car and go search some of these places on foot (in lieu of that, there will be lists). Then I'll be fired up for de Toqueville (and chances are I'll read two and a half chapters and founder on the desire to read something with an actual plot and neglect the whole project until fall--still, I'll be halfway through at that point, so who cares?)

Anyhow. Happy reading. I love a good reading project.

Someone is seven

2012-01-09T13:43:00.000-07:00

In all the hoopla over holidays and the New Year, someone's milestone got lost in the scrunchled up wrapping paper and discarded boxes.

I asked her not to look mad, for once. See, it's possible.

Bloggily speaking, anyhow. In real life, the preparations for and recovery from the celebrations of sevenhood can be directly tied to several balls dropped this holiday season, including a) half the Christmas cards not leaving the house until too late to actually arrive before Christmas; b) several ungifted or subgifted members of the extended family; c) the singing Christmas decorations never managing to get paired with batteries (this one wasn't so bad, actually); d) probably something else that I am forgetting. Like baking. I meant to bake this year. It didn't happen.

We had 14 girls under the age of 8 in the house. Miraculously nothing got broken. Note: the soundtrack for this picture is all girls shouting in unison "Tramp-o-leen! Tramp-o-leen! Tramp-o-leen!" while they jump up and down. In unison.

A girl and her doll, united at last.

So. Seven. It's an amazing age, or at least the seven-year-old we have constantly amazes me. M. and I joke that what she really needs is a production studio. And a workshop. And a warehouse. And...a trained staff. At least once a week Helen comes to me and in between bouncing up and down on the couch or petting her favorite stuffed animal or brushing her hair with her exciting new brush she describes in great and casual detail how she's going to build a car for her American Girl Doll, or a bed, or a teepee, or a desk. Then she wants to get started right away, and when I stutter-- "Um, but, I'm actually making dinner right now," she bursts into angry tears. At any one time she is busy making sets for the stop-animation movie she's making, or a book about a girl in the city, or a box full of Kings Cibul (King's kibble) for her Pick-a-Pet store. Her half-done projects are all over the house. I may come back from a run and be commandeered to help sand teepee poles, or wield the hot glue gun, or listen to her new project, which is to get "my very own puppy," which, sadly for both us, turned out not to be My Very Own PuppyTM but an actual live puppy, "either a fox terrier or a chihuahua but not from a pet breeder place because those cost like $400."

"Ack! No! We are not getting a puppy!" I said, a veritable portrait of parental understanding and graciousness.

Tears, and a refusal to eat dinner until a puppy was promised and/or bought. After I'd gotten my shoes off and peed, and discussed the matter with M., I softened my tone a little (although just to be clear: we are *totally not* getting a puppy, for the love of god). Helen was not distracted and insisted we set a timeline. I refused, gently but firmly, to set a timeline. Tears.

It's unavoidable that many of her projects end in disappointment and despair, especially since we have neither a workshop nor a full-time trained staff. However, what is an amazement to equal her idea-generating brain is the fact that, actually, a lot of her projects do get completed. There's the Squirrel Stop game, sitting in its box under the counter. The book describing our trip to Yellowstone, which languished for months before finally being finished up in an afternoon. The doll bed. The doll desk. The million and one movies and stills featuring her stuffed animals in our digital camera's memory card. Most of these are just what you'd expect from a seven-year-old: cardboard and flimsy, with spidery writing and odd-shaped cutouts. She doesn't waste a lot of time laboring over the final product, in other words. But a few are actually really good, good enough that I find myself wishing that if I could grant her one fairy godmother wish it would be this: follow-through. (Actually, if I could grant myself one fairy godmother wish it would be follow-through.) Because when this girl harnesses her persistence to start a project to completing her vision of how the project ought to turn out, she's going to be a force of nature.

This photo kind of says it all.

One of my resolutions should be to post more

2012-01-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

And in honor of that, I'm gonna start with a classic post on January 1. Take that, procrastinatey gene! I'm using Sundry's meme, of course. Somewhat abbreviated, because...well, because of that procrastination gene (I have to accommodate somehow). Plus the long form feels a little too much like doing Turbo Tax.

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Buy a full-on family ski pass (dear GOD was that painful.) Buy skis and boots. Enroll a child in a private sports program. Have a close relative with stage four cancer (*kicks the wall angrily*). Visit my sister's place in St Louis. Probably a bunch of other things I've forgotten.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? 
Last year's resolutions:

1. Take the kids out into nature at least once a month.
I didn't keep a close enough record of this to be sure, but I think this was basically a pass.

2. Eat more wild food.

So long as we define "more" as "some juniper berries and a couple dandelion greens," we've got a pass.

3. Watch the moon rise at least once a month.

Yeah. FAIL.

4. Hike once a month.
Check! Here's the list, for anyone who cares (me):

January: Coyote Song/ Swallow Hill trails, 2 miles
February: Glendale Farm Open Space, app. 1 mile
March: Greenland Open Space, 4.5 miles
April: Lake Superior Waterfront, app. 4 miles; Kramer Woods trail, app. two miles; Briar Patch trail, app. 1 mile
May: Cherry Creek Ecological Park and Happy Canyon Trail, app. 1.5 miles; Glendale Farm Open Space trail, 1.5 miles
June: Lost Creek Wilderness, app. 1.5 miles.
July: Puma Hills, South Park, app. 0.5 miles; Mystic Falls trail, app. 4 miles
August: Glendale Farm Open Space, app. 1.5 mi., Cherry Creek Bike Path, 1 mi.
September: Kent Denver school property, app. 1 mi.
October: Castle, Parmalee and Tower trails, app. 4 mi
November: Frasier River Bike trail, app. 4 mi
December: Lee Lorraine Canyon, Bowen Canyon and Yetman trails, 3 mi; North Tenmile Trail, 3 miles

5. Meet my ToBeRead challenge (read at least 12 unread books from my personal collection). Here are the books I pledged to read:

1. Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl

2. At Home, Bill Bryson

3. Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

4. Collected Short Stories of Raymond Carver

5. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

6. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

7. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace

8. Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion

9. Little Heathens, Mildred Armstrong Kalish

10. Aeneid, Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles
11. Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez
12. The Story Behind the Story (various)

Here are the books I read:

1. Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl

2. At Home, Bill Bryson

3. Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

5. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

6. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (in progress)

7. Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion

8. Aeneid, Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles (in progress)
9. Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez

Well, 9 out of 12. Seventy-five percent to pass!

As to resolutions for next year, I'm keeping it simple. I'm going to remember the in-laws' birthdays and send cards. I'm going to check my 401K balances quarterly, so whenever I get the urge to monitor my progress toward retirement, I will be able to answer myself with ringing authority: NOT VERY WELL, THANK YOU! I'm going to try to hike every month. I'm going to do a smaller scale TBR (to be elaborated later, because already this post is a monster). I'm going to print out more photos. And the challenge: I'm going to do more follow-through on writing projects.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? 
No. What's UP with that?

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No.

5. What countries did you visit?
The great old U.S. of A. I don't even have a current passport.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
(sadly) More time with friends and family. Less house hassle. Less debt (*not* something that was lacking in 2011). More writing and more writing projects.

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
None, really, although the fall of 2011 will go down as fretful and anxious and ultimately Bad.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? 
Painting the front of the house. I wish I was joking.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not connecting with people as much I'd like.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Not really, although I suffered mental injury from the bill I got after taking Si to the emergency room for a sprained knee.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
The house & kitchen, although most of that was "bought" in 2010. Or now and for the next 30 years, take your pick.

12. Where did most of your money go?
The house, via mortage & the construction loan. Also baseball, skiing, and travel.

13. What did you get really excited about?
Hmm. I was excited about the finishing of the house and the return of its livability. Otherwise, though, "getting excited" is a state of mind I don't visit nearly enough.

14. Compared to this time last year, are you: 
– happier or sadder? sadder, alas.
– thinner or fatter? the same to slightly fatter. Not so fat that I have to pay attention, though.
– richer or poorer? richer, although perhaps less in actual net worth than in the sense that the financial situation is under control.

15. What do you wish you’d done more of? 
Made more connections; had more dinner parties; asked more people over; picked up the phone more. Wrote more.

16. What do you wish you’d done less of? 
Fretting about the house. Working on the house. Moving parts of the house and its furnishings from one place to another.

17. How did you spend Christmas?
With the four of us, my parents and my sister at my sister's lovely little apartment in St Louis. We opened presents, ran in the park, and ate traditional Christmas food, including creamed onions and two pies.

19. What were your favorite books of the year?
Bossypants. Biographies of Abigail Adams and Queen Isabella.

20. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
On my birthday I skied, then came back to a rented condo and celebrated with M, the kids, my sister in law and my nephew. Since this was my big four-oh, I was supposed to have celebrated with my parents and sister as well, but--well, crap happened. I did get to see Mom and Dad and my sister AND my aunt, though, on the weekend before, which made up for them not being there on the day (but not, of course, for the reason they weren't there).

21. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Satisfying? Well. Made some huge trip and/or gotten some wonderful job, I guess. I would have been plenty happy (even "satisfied") with simply a different diagnosis for my mom, though.

22. What kept you sane?
I'm not totally sure I was.

23. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011. 
Life is too damn short.

Tucson to teenager

2011-12-10T07:16:00.001-07:00

The radio silence chez Melospiza has been due to an unprecedented spate of traveling--I've been three different places the past three weekends, and none of those places has been home. I'm craving some serious downtime, which, HAHA, try fifteen more years. Then you can have downtime, sister. In the meantime, it's the buy-decorate-be-thoughtful season, so go.

I began the week in Tucson. Not a bad place to begin, if you can arrange it.

My hotel at 7 am. By this time the following day, I was already in Denver. It was...a very long day.

When I got home, Silas had a question. "When are you going to the store next?" he asked, and I thought he was going to ask for more borax. His class is doing the solutions and mixtures unit in science and he's been an experimental machine lately. He's also been something of a terror in the kitchen. We may never get the cornstarch out of the floorboards.

"Could you get some hair gel?"

Hair in the pre-comb phase. Now it's long enough for styling.

And so it begins, I thought. He's also been combing his hair a lot recently--five or six times a day.

The obvious assumption is that there's a female involved, but I haven't been able to ascertain any details and I'm kind of loathe to darken his mood, which has been uncharacteristically sunny and communicative (about borax and Legos, though, not girls, or sudden changes in cultural practices among fifth-grade boys.) And besides, I'm torn--on the one hand, I want to know everything, and on the other, I don't want to be intrusive. It's his life, he seems happy, and there don't appear to be any dangerous objects involved. I suppose we need to have some early version of The Talk, though.

Yikes.

After all, who could resist this guy, gelled hair or not?

Ski town, USA

2011-11-25T15:24:00.001-07:00

Toothy Mctootherson heading up for the day.

This is our Thanksgiving tradition (circa 2010): we haul the family up to Winter Park and in exchange for copious time at the condo pool we train them in the arts of rushing downhill really fast, in the hopes that someday they will be in it for the skiing and not the excessively chlorinated pool. This is what M. hopes, anyway. I mostly hope that nobody ends the day in the ski patrol clinic.

I look rather severe. Perhaps I am instructing Helen in a matter of lift-riding etiquette.

Luckily (for my anxiety level), the kids have inherited my cautious DNA. Every so often I'll see some lavender- or olive-drab-wearing mite zip down the slopes with aplomb and style; after a brief moment of proud disbelief I'll realize that it's not actually my own offspring and that my child, in fact, is the one oozing downhill in a sensible snowplow formation. Nevertheless, M. has high hopes that someday we'll all be ski crazy.

(That will be great, I think. I'll watch you all lovingly from the lodge, where I'll be reading a good book.)

(I kid. I like skiing fine. All except for the impact-and-injury part.)

(You know what I like? The run I took this morning, alone, along the snowcovered bike trail, past the black ice-lined water, under the spruce and almost out of earshot of the highway.)

Welcome to my mountain.

Silas is actually getting rather skillful, in a slow and sensible way. I think technically we share the same ski ability, he and I, much as we share the same boot size, snowpant and helmet.

Actually, I think his boots are too big for me now.

"That's a pretty good view," said Silas. "Better take a picture for Sue."

When we're packing to leave the house, I'm always in a mood--do we have to go? For all those days? And then we get here; the house and all its chores seems pleasantly distant and so long as I have my books and a decent amount of time in which to enjoy the condo in solitude, I am content.

And here we are. The cares of the world feel very far away, and for a little while I am content.

Sunny & cold with a chance of fantasticness

2011-11-13T20:18:00.001-07:00

The Melospiza family made a trip to the Big City over the weekend (yes, that big city. The one we LIVE in. Why?)

Helen terrorizing the natives. Silas is sussing the newness of the situation.

Si felt pensive.

Ultimately, they decided they were pro arts.

They raised a little ruckus.

It was a good day.

We went to see a show: Tom Sawyer--I feel a little about this the way I feel about watching the movie after the book (especially since this is my third play in a row that was an adaptation of a book--three for three) (that's actually kind of weird. Resolved: the next play I see will *not* be as seen in the best-selling book)--like, won't this just be basically an illustration of the story I just read?

Nevertheless, it would be hard to overestimate how delighted I was by the whole thing (except the price, which was RIDIC.) It's partly that the last 18 events we've attended as a family downtown have been sporting--not that I am opposed to sporting events, per se, and I view it as one of my personal strengths that I have come to an appreciation of public athletic events to the point where I can actually think of going to a baseball game at Coors Field without falling to the ground in desperate boredom, but there are other family delights hanging on the tree of the city, and I have long wanted to pick these, too. It's partly that one of the things I remember most fondly from growing up was all the local theater productions we attended. It's also that what we have in Denver is, in fact, quite a whole lot better than local theater production and I've yet to walk out of the Denver Performing Arts Center without my lips smacking in delighted appreciation. It's been something I've been wanting to do since we moved here, in other words, and Lo, we have finally done it, and it was cultural and enriching and etc.

We aren't, as a family, all that arty, which is somewhat boggling to me and is what my high school self would have found most disappointing/ shocking about my life now. Although I don't know if a yearly trip to the theatah is going to make us more...arty. I'm not sure what would do that...actual artists in the house, perhaps? Besides our enthusiastic 6-year-old artist, that is. I imagine something like the creatively couch-slumming creatures in the Moomintroll books (and then I imagine trying to play Moominmama, taking care of all those needy creative souls, probably while trying to make sure homework gets done and maintaining an actual paying job...no thanks. Alas. Perhaps it's just as well we're more sportif.)

Mom starts chemo today. I leave tomorrow to go visit. I am both eager with anticipation and sort of dreading it, dreading everything to come in this next phase.

Middle Earth

2011-11-09T21:13:00.000-07:00

We've moved into November, real fall, the kind with long brown days and freezing nights and sodden clumps of mush where we didn't manage to rake all the leaves before the snow fell. The kids have had the barfing sickness, mostly in our bedroom, which means that our once new rug is no longer safe to do pushups on. The mountains are brilliant white and, thanks to the advent of Daylight Spending Time, my morning run happens at sunrise, which is a beautiful thing. We are as crazy as elves (and not because we're planning ahead for the buying season. As IF.)

The news from home is bad, and I have been exerting a lot of mental energy to reset my expectations re my mother and the future. Some days I am a mess, but mostly I am melancholy but serene, even happy. The kids and their day-to-day emergencies keep me constantly in the present; the mostly up tenor of their days makes mine up, too. One of my holds at the library comes in, or I get a new idea about a story that I'm s-l-l-l-o-w-l-y working on, or the kids have a good day at school, or my morning run is white and pink and beautiful, and I feel happy, like the world is going well, more or less. Then I remember: no, it is so, so not.

Other times, I will even be sanguine about the so-not-ness. My mom feels fine, after all. I could pick up the phone and call her right now, except that she'd probably be out for a walk with my dad. Things are at-this-moment okay, and new therapies offer so much promise. You hear all the time about remissions that last for decades--maybe it will in this case. Why not?

And then I lie down at the end of the day, and I do that calming thing where I spread my mind over all the people in my life and mentally tuck them in and smooth their foreheads, make sure they're okay--all my chickens under one roof, even if that roof is the wide-open sky of the Midwest--and my hand catches: no. Not everyone is okay. Not at all.

Or I will be fine until I come across a calendar, and my mind is forced into dangerous places, like This Time Next Year. Or the work meeting I go to this spring in Minnesota--how will things be then? Or the baseball meet Si has in June--what will conditions be at that time? Or the 2013 work meeting. Or--and then I shut it down, quick. Because I can't imagine that. No. Better to think about the end of the month, the plans we have to ski in a couple of weeks, the benefits form that has to be turned in next week, the fish I need to remember to pick up for dinner, the email I have to write.

And then I turn to the nearest kid and hug them hard, until they can squirm away.

Pumpkins and more

2011-11-04T18:10:00.000-06:00

Just looking at this picture makes me want to wash my hands.

The weekend before Halloween was pleasant(ish) and warm. Then it snowed. That, plus random stretches of drought, is local weather in a nutshell. The kids carved our hand-grown pumpkins and courteously kept the gloop in piles on the porch. I am normally not a squeamish person and I will gladly catch the bird/ wasp/ moth/ snake/ spider that may infest your office, but I kind of dread the annual Carving of the Pumpkin due to the touching of the gloop.

An interesting comparison photo from the archives. Silas approaches pumpkin carving as he approaches particularly juicy math problems: with seriousness and the directorial instincts of a third-world dictator. Also as an opportunity to assert his rights of primogeniture (note that he has the largest pumpkin in both pictures).

The cuts must be made just so.

She used to dislike gloop, too.

These were found growing in the gloop. Note the shininess of her hands. Gloop.

Winning!

Halloween night was cool and windy; I began the night with Helen and her friends, a small but enthusiastic group, and ended it in the company of about 6 parents I didn't know watching my proto teen engage in barely-organized wilding (focused on candy and directed only toward each other, I hasten to add; it's not like we were overseeing the TPing of trees and the egging of mailboxes, or anything) as part of a swarm of other proto teens. I much preferred the former but the latter still beat sitting at home with the doorbell and the bowl of candy. What is it about handing out candy that panics me so? Is it the constant summons to the door? Is it the awkward exchange of mumbled trick or treats to rote compliments on costumes? Is the way I close up the door, my relief marred by second guessing my attempts to parse costume choices? Or is it just that sitting at home alone while the party rages outside feels a like hangover from high school?

Ugh. I don't know. But I do have an educational and non-holiday-themed story.

The story begins in the emergency room with a sore knee (Si's, for the record). Number one: we shouldn't have been in the emergency room. That become abundantly clear during the hour and a half we spent on the premises (in my written complaint later on, I called this time "waiting." Apparently it was not waiting. Waiting only occurs between the time you against your better judgement admit that you're willing to be admitted and your first visit from a medical professional. Four minutes, in our case, as the lady who called me to do damage control stated.) The knee was not that sore. No major damage had been sustained. No medications needed to be applied. We did get an ice pack, which we got to keep. Yay, yay and yay. I was still disgruntled that I didn't just go to a damn urgent care but hey, with no medications and no real medical attention--he did get an x ray, and let me tell you, my friends, do NOT do this--how bad could it be? Really?

$1,971.72 worth of bad, is what it could be. Which our insurance company knocked down to the still astronomical $1037.72. For a sprained knee.

This caused me to break one of my cardinal rules of conduct: I protested my grade. In phone and in writing and, wow, hey. I did not know this, but apparently medical billing operates on the same general premises that Craigslist haggling does. My mild and gentle protests (although I did say things like "this is what's wrong with medical care today" and "this is ridiculous" and "highway robbery" etc.) got the price lowered to $732. When another damage control agent connected with M, the price dropped to $384. Still ridiculous, but within the realm of you're-too-stupid-to-go-to-urgent-care-so-maybe-you-deserve-it.

Lesson # 1: Urgent care.
Lesson #2: Argue the bill. OMG.
Lesson #3: Urgent care. Also, no fifth grader who has visited a bouncy castle between the time of injury and the time of complaint, esp. if that complaint happens to occur on a weekday morning just before school, needs to go to the damn doctor. Jeesh.

Change

2011-10-28T12:54:00.004-06:00

As is usual in these parts, this week fall abruptly turned off the lights and left, slamming the door on its way out. Where Tuesday morning dawned sunny and pleasant, the streets lined with red and green and gold, Tuesday night it rained and Wednesday it snowed. Our beleaguered walnut tree began Tuesday as an ethereally golden harbinger of doom and by Wednesday evening it was a stick with a sodden pile of brown muck at its base. All done. Next!

Luckily for my mood I like this time of year, with its frost-on-the-grass mornings and its bleak, unpretentious prospects. Where some people get melancholy and weepy as the days shorten up and night falls faster, I feel a little tingling of anticipation (books fire holidays birthday Food pies stuffing PRESENTS), which Helen, as a fellow late-fall birthday-er, totally gets. We started reading The Long Winter during the uniformly beautiful days of August and had to put it up because "it makes me want it to be wiiiiinter." Well, okay, Muffin, although I wouldn't really call this one a paean to the glories of snow. I get it. You're my daughter, through and through.

The other one in my house, though. If I hadn't been present and accounted for at his birth I might be starting to wonder right about now whether he truly belonged to me. This week, for example, he came home with a stack of math problems and set about doing them cheerfully and even, I would say, with relish and zeal. And zest. He talks about them, kind of smacking his lips with the deliciousness of it. Meanwhile, I vaguely looked over the packet in the interest of parental involvement and immediately felt a build up of static cling in my head. I don't remember all my dreams this week but I sense that one involved panicky toil over just such a stack of problems.

In contrast but related, Wednesday he got the chance to go see Obama speak in downtown Denver. After a little convincing related to the okayness of missing Bear Club and the once-in-a-lifetime-ness and the crowds-will-be-fine, he agreed to go. "How was it?" I asked when he got back, excited for him. "Good," he said in that slightly accented monotone which means he did enjoy himself, however little he may effuse. "What surprised you the most?" This is a little conversational gambit I use sometimes to get around the "how-was-it-great" problem. He was silent for a while. Sack of potatoes silent. He might have been thinking, or he might just have been absenting himself from a difficult line of questioning.

"Well? Anything? What was most surprising?"

More silence. Then: "The snow."

Well. Okay then. The snow. You'll be able to tell your grandkids you saw Obama and it was great, it snowed.

Falling

2011-10-25T14:44:00.000-06:00

It took them four hours, but this entire pile and more made it to the back yard.

So we're rushing toward Halloween, costumes ready, pumpkins grown and picked, pumpkin lights up. Ordinarily this is one of my favorite months. Warm days, cool nights, perfect conditions for training the children in quasi-agricultural labor, which as everyone from Agricola on knows is the best possible thing for their little characters (now if we could also encourage them to engage in that labor outside the home, i.e., on someone else's payroll, we'd be gold. As it is I'm out $30 bucks after a particularly vigorous bout of weekend Helping.) The kids are doing well--it's kind of a golden year for both of them, possibly the last one ever (at least that will occur in tandem). After all, Si starts Middle School next year. Life as a nuclear family will only go down from here.

It was our anniversary last week (fifteen years!). We spent it as couples at a certain life stage do, which is to say wedged into tiny plastic chairs at a school function:

M, at least, got to stretch his legs a bit.

It was also the anniversary of this:

That tree is really one of the best aspects of the neighborhood.

See? Still looks good, with 100% less noxious drywall dust.

Life is good, and yet Life, she is kicking my rear end to the curb. I am spending these idyllic fall days either weighed to the ground with trepidation and sadness or gliding along in a haze of denial: my mother is sick. This is as much as I want to say, because this thing that is happening is her private event and I have a feeling if I say anything it will flop awkwardly over into the realm of saying too much. So to summarize: the color of this fall is grief. I am alternately prostrate and hopeful, as are we all. Well, except the kids. They are still, and hopefully will get to remain, delightfully oblivious that anything bad could happen to the people they love.

Octobery

2011-10-11T12:10:00.000-06:00

One of my Facebook friends posted this last week:

40 miles of trails, all dirt. Two wheels, no engine (except my legs). Huge vistas. Gold autumn leaves. Blue sky. Home to green chili stew, a Myrcenary microbrew, my dawgs and cats and the love of my life. A perfect day. So grateful.

I left this comment: "This sounds like pretttty much my perfect day."

Then I thought: uh, I think. That would be enjoyable, right? Or is that just something I used to like and now I like something else? What do I like?

Yup, it's official: I don't even know what a perfect day is anymore. I count a weekend good if I:

Clean all the things;
Get a good long run in and sling some dirt and branches around in the back;
Spend some quality one-on-one time with the kids; and/or
Do something. Like: take the kids to a new park, go for a hike, go camping/skiing, etc.

For example, this past weekend we did this. Enjoyable? Yes. Life-affirming? Hmm.

I mean, these aren't bad. Family time, tending the home hearth, exploring the great world around--in a rather small-scale and time-limited way, but still: out! about! breathing the open air etc.! These are the things of which a good life is made. So what if a good weekend falls into two categories: good because it helps me get rested and caught up to face another week, or good because for at least a few hours I get to step off the endless merry-go-round of routine. So what if while I'd call a weekend like this good, I'd hardly reach for the superlative "perfect." Good is good. To paraphrase Annie Dillard, a day spent tinkering in the yard and playing educational games with the kids isn't necessarily a good day, but a life spent doing such things is a good life.

I used to dream about having a place to garden. Now I have it. It's nice.

Then why does this life feel so limited? Why do I read my (childless, freelance writer) friend's post and sigh deeply, wistfully, as though I am sitting in my cell at San Quentin and watching a little biplane fly by, perhaps with the occupants inside laughing and clinking champagne glasses?

(Grass is greener. Duh.)

Well, fine. There probably is a grass-is-greener element. Maybe if I were living a life in which I could see a beautiful fall day and decide to hit the trails for a 40-mile bike ride, I would be thinking wistfully of Life with a Family or Life with Affordable Health Insurance/ 401k/ steady paycheck that didn't require hustle. Or maybe I would be living my dream life. I really don't know. (I'm pretty sure I would miss having the kids, despite all their whining and meMEme-ness and preferred habitat: suburban big city-ness. The steady paycheck, though. Hmm. If I could have "paycheck," hold the "steady"--well.)

I really would miss this guy. Most of the time.

I'm going to have to file this post under "things to think about later," though, because wistfulness aside, I'm not planning to jettison any part of my life right now. The 40-mile bike ride, and the life that can easily expand to accommodate it, will have to wait. Is this selling out? I suppose so. Jack Kerouac would not approve, or Katherine Mansfield, or Percy Bysshe Shelly. But I'm not living in a Beat novel. My life is more like Trollope. And even though the romantic Beat poet living in my psychic attic may wail and rage, I can't really hear her right now, because the kids are making too much noise. What I want most of all at this particular (fifteen-year) moment in my life is to provide a steady stable for them to bed down in. Prudence and moderation: these are actually my desires right now (can you believe I'm saying this?)

He appreciates it, though. You can really tell.

Corn and other signs of fall

2011-10-04T14:36:00.001-06:00

Well, for those of you who haven't noticed it, fall is definitely here:

Although you might be forgiven for not noticing, what with it being so dang hot. I'm only sort of complaining, though, since as of the itty bitty mini cold snap we had a week or so ago, the garden had only yielded two (2) ripe tomatoes. The cold snap didn't manage to frost, at least not in our yard, so the tomatoes pulled through and now are turning out all sorts of ripe fruit. Yay tomatoes, etc.

Only slightly snaggletoothed.

We used the weekend to do some seasonal things, like visit the corn maze. I'm actually not sure how I feel about corn mazes. They're seasonal! And smell like hay! And are harvest-related! I like harvest things! Buuuut...they're also kinda. Well. You know. You kinda don't do anything except wander aimlessly through tunnels of corn. Maybe if I were alone I could get into the whole maze/puzzle/ brain growth aspect, but as it is I spend most of my time running after disappearing kids calling out, "Don't get too far ahead! Wait up! Don't turn until you make sure we're all there!"

This is the first time we've done the corn maze during daylight hours.

It's definitely in daylight. Still vaguely ominous, though.

Also kind of fret-inducing.

Especially when big brother's in charge.

We did make it all the way through, though, which was a first.

Anyhow. There are a lot of fret-inducing things going on chez Melospiza these days, so maybe wandering half-distracted through a maze of living organism was just the thing for a hot Sunday in October.

Madame Helen's School for Fine Stuffed Animals

2011-09-28T13:38:00.001-06:00

As I said in my last post, it will surprise no one if Helen becomes a teacher. Yeah, sure, she vigorously denies this possibility herself ("I want to be an ARTIST"), but come on, her favorite game right now is playing school:

Class is in session. She calls them The Children. As in, "The Children are having recess now, so I can brush my teeth."

She works very hard at it, since she has to be both teacher and nine students.

The subjects are spelling, gymnastics, soccer and drawing.

She has not missed Silas at all this week, by the way. Or claims not to. "Do you like getting all of our attention all to yourself?" I asked as she rode her scooter to the bus. "Yesssss," she answered, cackling a little.

I miss him, though. He'll be home tonight. Then all my chickens will be under my roof.

2011-09-26T15:34:00.000-06:00

Another heartbreakingly beautiful weekend. I spent it in the usual ways: cleaning, chipping away at projects, watching sports, and snatching moments when I can for reading. I maybe spent more time at the latter than usual, doing a little comfort reading (Room), but I did manage to show up here:

Sports are fun, but it's really about the snacks

Where we ran into more old acquaintances--we knew two girls on the opposite team, plus the coach. The whole Kidsport craziness--the endless idyllic days dragging out endless folding chairs and applying endless rounds of sunscreen and cheering, endlessly, for the team that either wins or doesn't win, broken only by the perhaps-longer-than-necessary trips to the bathroom or the car or escpaing, hooky-like, to the nearest coffeeshop--is made marginally better by the social aspect.

Still a little uncertain about actual game play

It's still kind of tiring. On Sunday I didn't even try to drag Helen to Si's early game, the one that started at 8:30. Instead we biked over to the local kid triathalon, in which two of her friends were competing and which struck her fancy enough (I think it was the medals) for her to get sulky and grumpy and want to leave because "I wanted to do the race. Why didn't you sign me up, Mommy? You're MEAN." So: next year, triathalon. Then we came home and cleaned. That is, I cleaned, and took comfort-reading breaks, and Helen spent 2.5 hours closed up in her room administering spelling tests to her stuffed animals. They all did very well, although I think there was a little grade inflation at work, because even Carrots, who got an A+++, spelled animal wrong, and no one did worse than a B+ despite some test-takers having long lists of meticulously misspelled words.

It will surprise no one if she becomes a teacher

Sometimes it feels a little like we live in separate families--the baseball family and the everything else family--so in the afternoon we roused ourselves and went over to Si's second game. The social aspects of that crowd are less congenial, now that we're on a new team and only know a handful of other parents.

It was a quiet weekend. The rest of our time was spent packing for Si's week of Outdoor Education with his school--his whole class will be spending three days up in the mountains, playing trust games and orienteering and who knows what else. Si is up to his ears in excitement, mostly at the opportunity to pack (like me, he loves packing a list of supplies) and also about the bus ride.

Oh the busy days of now

2011-09-19T10:19:00.000-06:00

It was a beautiful fall weekend--no, an exquisite fall weekend, and we did all the sorts of things a family should in this event. We went to a Rockies game, we watched some fireworks, we stood about on the sidelines of a soccer game* and two little league games**. I went for a run along trails brushed by yellowing leaves and ripening plums. I strategized about making wild plum jam and chokecherry jam. I bought plants and planted them in the yard and now one edge of the yard is looking better, definitely starting to look better, less like the chicken-scratched flats of a tarpaper shack and more like something you'd like to rest your eyes on while you have a drink. We had dinner with friends (the long-delayed BBQ I complained about earlier, in fact). There was a sleepover and a birthday party and neither one was at my house. I cleaned the floors.

In spite of all this, or, probably, because of it, I spent the entire weekend holding my breath while I dashed from one thing to another and by Sunday night I was in a vicious, hectoring mood. I need to improve my practice, I can see. My living-in-the-moment zen practice.

*Helen's first. I now have two children in organized sports. This is both a wonderful thing and sort of a slow torture.

**I managed, regretfully, to attend neither. The secret saving grace to having multiple children in multiple activities is that at some point it becomes physically impossible to be present at them all and while this doesn't exactly provide free time, it does provide some respite. Except on the times, like next weekend, when everything is staggered and there is neither free time nor respite--nor time that would normally be occupied by doing things like, say, brushing teeth or securing food.

But am I grateful? Yes. I'm grateful for it all, and already feeling melancholy about its inevitable end.

Friends of the Mosquito Coast

2011-09-07T16:00:00.000-06:00

I have been thinking a lot about friendship lately, and who has it, and where one can get it, and how one can improve it when one does have it. This may or may not be related to a slightly pathetic email I sent to an old friend saying that we needed to schedule a hike ASAP because I was feeling lonely and weird (see, this is the kind of friend to whom I can get away with saying stuff like this. I haven't been making many such friends lately.) But this life of ours right now--with the full-time jobs and the full-time kids and the kid activities and the House Issues--does not leave a whole lot of room for friendship. And it's partly that the last three casual BBQ get togethers we had planned fell through at the last minute due to scheduling conflicts and it's partly that these were in June and it's partly that other social interactions we've been having as a couple, as a family, as a unit have been deeply unsatisfying, but I'm not even sure at this point that we're capable of either making new friends or maintaining contacts with old ones, and I think it's a phase but I'm not sure and I'm getting just a liiiiittle bit desperate. And by we I mean us as a family. Because at this point, except for a few dusty holdouts from previous lives, I do not make friends independently. I just do not have the fucking time. And it kind of fucking sucks, which is why I tell myself that it is a phase and not a prison sentence without possibility of parole.

So: who has it? The kids have it. The kids' friendships are a total priority in our household, a fact of which I'm both proud and kind of irritated with. Playdates, sleepovers, even the fact that we're in a neighborhood we can't quite afford (well, the NEIGHBORHOOD is fine, it's the particular HOUSE we bought that sits on our shoulders like a 2-ton vulture): if we make a decision about social life, it's generally to promote the kids' ties with other kids of their choice. We do this because I think it's the right thing to do, and also it's easier. The children are a Force that Must Be Obeyed.

Who doesn't have it? The adults, that's who. We have old friends, whom we both neglect and feel resentful toward for neglecting us, when we have time for resentment, which is not often. Our old friends live in other towns, so most of the time, they're sort of off the radar. We have a few sputtering friendships as a family/couple, but these are arduous to maintain (see canceled BBQs above). There's the sheer logistical challenge, which we usually aren't up for. We barely have dinner together, let alone in the company of others. The few families we do, or did, see regularly tend to be baseball families, only now that Si's changing teams that doesn't work so well (plus the competitive BS that's starting to accompany baseball kind of seeps poisonously into the grownup friendships, too.) M., for all his baseball involvement, is sort of bored to death by other baseball dads. I like the baseball moms, generally, but I like them better when we don't talk baseball. Anyhow. It all adds up to a whole lotta not seeing anyone, ever, except on sidelines or at front doors while exchanging children.

How to get more of it? That's what I'm trying to figure out, when I can devote the energy to figuring, which is not often. Most of the time I feel stuck in a place of great activity and busyness but also great echoing spaces of loneliness and strangeness. I feel both dazzled and sad, when I have time to notice my feelings, which luckily, I guess, is not too often. Mostly I try to feel resigned and accepting of the fact that I am just in a lonely period of my life right now.

The hopeful thing is, we (and I) have been in this place before. We've come through.

*

I have also been thinking about The Mosquito Coast, which I am listening to as I drive, and which could be considered the original primer of how not to be a helicopter parent. Along with, say, David Copperfield. It's about an eccentric and antisocial inventor who ups and moves his family of four to the inner jungle of Honduras (where, confusingly, most of the people they encounter speak English, which, if you have to be stranded in a third-world country with a psycho parent and in a novel by Paul Theroux, besides, is really the best possible option, or so it seems at this point in time. I'm only a third of the way through.) And I'm finding myself having a strangely mixed reaction to their situation. On the one hand, when in the first chapter it seems for a while that the father has died, I was very happy, because I was so sick of him already. On the other hand, I think I could learn a little from his parenting, even as I'm wincing at his method (just up and move to a third-world country for selfish, screwed-up motives of your own! what about providing security?! what about stability?! what about a kid's right to self-determination?). I mean, not even the most old-school we've-got-to teach-the-kids-independence diehard would approve of his methods (humiliate your son into climbing a ship's rigging in a storm, and enlist younger siblings in the teasing--not great parenting). But the son did climb the rigging, and got over his fear, a little, and came a long way toward being stronger and more self-reliant: he learned very decisively that the world didn't revolve around him, which is a useful lesson. Of course, it helped that he didn't die while he was learning it. And one of his enduring lessons does seem to be how to hate his dad. But, speaking as person who has basically shaped her whole life around her kids and who occasionally gets resentful about it (see above), teaching kids that they aren't the center of the universe does seem to have a certain bracing value.

Tom Sawyer and Mary Lennox

2011-08-29T15:48:00.004-06:00

I don't consider myself a heliocopter parent (smugly so, I might add), and then I notice myself doing things like checking the 5th-grade website five times a day (still not updated for the new week) (I HATE that). In my defense I'll insist that I'm just curious and I have NO INTENTION of discussing the contents/ activities with either my fifth grader or his teacher.

(Total lie, BTW. I'll "discuss" it with Si, and the conversation will go something like this:

Me: Hey, I noticed that you guys are reading ___.
Si: (crickets chirping)
Me: (slightly aggrieved whisper) Si. That was kind of a question.
Si: What? Oh. Yeah, we are.
Me: And what do you think? Do you like it?
Si: (shrugs) Mm hmm.
Me: (kicking self for asking a yes-or-no question) What's it about?
Si: Um. This guy does this thing, and then he has a dog, and then he does something, I don't remember what, and then he does this other thing. He rides the bus, I think.
Me: Oh. What's your favorite part?
Si: (raising his face to the ceiling and speaking in a just-end-this-conversation-NOW monotone): I like it ALLLLL.

Meanwhile, I ask Helen on the third day of school what she did in class today (this is after we reviewed in detail all the important parts of the day, such as recess, the other recess, lunch, and specials). She sighs noisily and says, "We just did the USUAL STUFF, MOM."

In summary: I have NO BLOODY IDEA what either of my children are doing in school. Hence my obsessive refreshing of the 5th grade website.

This is one reason I like reading to them at the end of the day so much. At least that's one thing that's going into their brains that I'm involved in. Also, I've said this before, but reading kids' books is one of the main reasons I had kids. As soon as Si reaches a non-read-aloud-to-age--like, gasp, 11--I'm going to have to insist that he start reproducing, so that by the time Helen is too old to read to, I'll have a read-aloud partner again. Although the catch will be that I'll have to read a bunch of the same books instead of all new material. Already I'm on reread #2 of The Secret Garden--there could be worse books to reread twice in two years, of course, but I find myself throwing longing glances at Pippi Longstocking and the Moomintroll books.

Si and I are reading Tom Sawyer, and we're both more-or-less enjoying it. This is one of those books that I wanted to read less because I lovity-loved it as a child (I didn't, and I still don't--Tom is kind of vain and self-aggrandizing, and the book is a little heavy on the adult-directed cultural commentary for either my taste or Si's) than because it's an Essential Book. You might think, from this statement, that I'm a canon-driven, reading-is-good-for-your-character kind of pedant, and, well, you'd be right. In my defense, I'm doing it because someone has to. His school favors dreary, good-for-you Cultural Context/ Sensitivity Training books, and he favors series. Both of these are fine, but they tend to omit or elide certain aspects of real life. Such as: one of the things I like about Tom Sawyer this time around is that it shows girls and boys living in entirely separate, mutually antagonistic worlds. Sure, Tom likes Becky Thatcher (that part is kind of weird, actually), but they aren't friends. Almost every other kid book in the world is based on a dual girl-and-boy hero/heroine set, and they're usually best pals and completely support each other. Which is a nice model. It also doesn't exist for kids over the age of 6, as far as I can tell.

Also, Tom's friends are both his bosom pals and...kind of based on opportunistic serendipity. They aren't friends because they really understand each other, or have long heart-to-heart conversations, or show up on the doorstep bearing comic books and bubblegum when the other guy is sick. No, they're friends because they happen to be in the same place at the same time and like to play the same things. Or they're friends because they totally envy the other guy's set-up (see Tom's affection for Huck: is it Huck he likes, or the fact that Huck doesn't have to go to school or bed or church? And does he even get Huck? I don't think he does. Camping out on the island with stolen food is a lark for Tom but pretty SOP for Huck, and it's not at all clear that Tom understands that this is what Huck's life is like all the time.) But none of this stuff matters: they're friends, or buddies, or whatever, and that's all they need. Whenever I stare at Si's roster of hero-worship friends, neighborhood pals, baseball buddies and other opportunistic associations and wonder what the hell friendship even means for him, it helps to remember Tom Sawyer.

First firsts

2011-08-24T20:22:00.008-06:00

First day of first grade:

First day of the last year of elementary school (ce n'est pas possible):

First photo of the first season of the sideyard garden, of which I am inordinately proud (see also: the nectarine tree behind the kids above. You would think I was sprouting these fruits myself):

Pumpkins, sunflowers, morning glories, beans, a lonely (and late-developing) stalk of corn. A glorious case of powdery mildew on the curcubitae associates.

It's been a good week so far. I've heard rumors of kids who dread going back to school and get grumpy and weepy and out of sorts as the ominous day approaches, but I have not given birth to children of this stripe. They were little wound-up springs of anticipation all last week and they have been exhausted but jubilant (and kind of strung out) this week. They both have male teachers this year and while Helen is on occasion prejudiced against boy teachers and boys in general, she has so far given a tentative stamp of approval to her teacher. Silas is thrilled unto death. As he should be. His teacher is young, funny, energetic and smart: he makes me wish I could be going to fifth grade. I have high hopes for this year. At the very least, maybe Si's writing scores won't decline over the course of the year, as they have the past two years in a row. Argh.

One thing that has been kind of--not sad, exactly, but melancholy--is that by fifth grade, we are getting into the time when parents who chose our elementary school for list-y, rate-y, type-A kind of reasons are starting to get restless and look for the next Xtreme Education Challenge. I sound judgy but I'm not, not really; I have certainly played in that tournament myself over the years. However, in a possibly ironic twist, and one which I did not quite anticiapte, the kids who are leaving now tend to be the most interesting and unusual ones--the boy who has already started his own business, the smart, arty girl with the Velma vibe and the awesome glasses whom I maaaybe had had a little fantasy of S dating sometime in the future. I was kind of looking forward to seeing how these kids developed, come middle school and high school; now I see that I won't. They aren't regular friends of Si's, and I don't know the parents, so: chapter finished. See ya. So I'm a little bummed for that.

Overall, though: wow. What a difference a year makes. Last year we were up to our eyeballs in drywall dust, mold, torn-out walls and money panic, not to mention the first prickings of irritation and misgiving about our choice of builders. There wasn't one thing that was easy, from keeping track of school-to-home papers to washing the damn dishes. Now, despite a triple-book schedule of baseball, swimming and soccer (we're like, a sporty family--I never would've thought that, not in a million years), M's four-year review at work and accompanying 80-hour-a-week workweek, things feel smooth.

Three...two...one...

2011-08-20T19:59:00.004-06:00

For his daily writing assignment so that his writing muscles don't atrophy, I asked Silas to write about what he was looking forward to most about school. Here's what he wrote:

It has been a long, boring summer. Camp, horseback riding, fishing, Legos, a trip to Yellowstone, fishing, playing with friends, sleepovers, a sleepover party, homemade ice cream, homemade popsicles, pool, cousin time, grandparent time, crawdad fishing, biking the neighborhood, zoo, museum, more Legos...

Thank god that's over and he can finally DO something all day. Well, six hours of the day, at least.

Meanwhile, Helen and Mary, her doll, are both looking forward to starting first grade.

We visited the Denver Doll and Toy Museum to celebrate (and also because The Boys went to the Rockies game).

Last days of summer

2011-08-15T07:12:00.007-06:00

Summer is such a schizophrenic time for me. On the one hand, I wake up at five thirty and run, shower and go to work, the same as I do every other frigging day of the year. On the other hand, the house is filled with long lazy days and unfulfilled desires and endless, endless fights over who gets to have a playdate or who is touching whose Legos. I get home and the heat and need to loaf hit me like a wave, but then there is no loafing, because however leisurely the kids might feel themselves, they don't really share that feeling with others, and monitoring them is a fulltime job and M has been up in his ears with it for the past nine hours and it's my turn now and also everyone is hunnnngrrry. So like every other mother on the planet I am looking forward with panting enthusiasm to the first day of school. I am also trying to wring every last drop of summer from this month. Thus this weekend I spent in a frenzy of yard work, and then took the kids (and my parents, who are visiting in order to help us with the last critical week before school starts) to do two installments of our summer Park Project.

The pavilion at Cheesman Park

The Park project is where we visit Denver parks, investigate their offerings, and fill out a little survey sheet.

Helen gave the fountains top marks but found the playground average at best.

The survey sheets are more to make it official than anything else (well, I think Silas secretly loves them. They fulfill his need for order). Otherwise we're just visiting parks and testing the playgrounds. These were our second and third parks; last time we went to Observatory Park, which still earns top marks from both kids (the observatory. Not many parks can boast a functional observatory, and the fact that it was closed on the day we visited probably made it even more desirable. The mysteries of the stars, etc., as opposed to the pain in the neck of peering through a telescope at tiny swimming pinpricks that, we're assured, are VERY IMPORTANT.)

Si tested the pavilion for scooter worthiness.
The playground was serviceable. Although less so for proto teens.

I'm hoping to visit at least one more park before the summer's really done (probably not before school starts, though, which means not before baseball and soccer start in earnest, so really, who am I kidding? Life, which has been pretending to be busy all summer, is about to crank into high gear.)

Smith Lake at Washington Park.

For me, the Park Project has been an excuse to visit places I've meant to go for three years and explore the city we sort of live in a little more. It's both satisfying and sad. I wish that I could have been doing this all summer, for one thing. And it makes me think of all the other things I wish I was doing with the kids, and how I desperately wish I could have the summers off, and how the kids are growing up and already Si is almost too old to be read aloud to (one of the main reasons I had kids, already phasing itself out! Why go on?). I get this rushing, panicky sense of needing to do it all now and maximize this day, this week, this time of their lives.

I have to forcibly sit down sometimes, and remember: in twenty years (in five years), the details won't matter. Their childhood will have become just that--the thing they have, imperfect, marked by expediency and what-we-happened-to-have-on-hand-at-the-time-ism--and it will be enough. Really. It will. Even if they don't learn Spanish.

I survived my son's first sleepover party

2011-08-11T12:42:00.006-06:00

and all I got was this little frisson of social anxiety.

Si's birthday celebration choice was to have seven, or eight, or maybe nine--"let me look through the school directory again real quick, Mom"--of his closest friends over for a sleepover. On his actual birthday, which did fall on a Monday this year, meaning, for the record, on a work night, and for the record let me also come right out and admit that I agreed to this arrangement. I'm not sure where in this process I conveniently forgot that this was insane.

Luckily--luckily--only four friends plus his cousin actually attended, so we had a total of six boys, who created a din that even a sleep-deprived and increasingly c-r-a-b-b-y adult could talk over when necessary (and oh, was it necessary). The night's first plan, the campout, had to be abruptly called off at 11:30 pm when the boys could not stop hootling (but there was toothpaste! in our tent!!). Plan B, which would have been nice, involved boys sleeping on couches and rugs. One solitary boy opted for this plan until 12:30 or so, when he gave up trying to sleep and asked to go home (M walked him home). Plan C involved legos, the basement, me trying to lay down the law and Silas protesting, "But it's a sleepover, Mom! That's what we DO on a sleepover!" and a very loud fan in our room. I was glad that the house was still standing in the morning and I reminded myself that Si and his friends will probably *not* be the types you can trust not to hold a Facebook rave at your house when you're out of town. Just for future reference, self.

However, now that I have caught up on my sleep and can reflect in peace, what the sleepover was the most was educational, with the topic of learning being pre-middle-school politics. Whenever the boys were eating they would talk, mostly trash talk, mostly about girls. ("P--- totally has a crush on me. It's so gross. Whenever I'm like delivering papers to her house she's all like, 'Hiiiii, I---, how arrrrre you.'" "Oh, I know! M--- has a crush on me! It's like awful! She's always asking to be in my group and stuff!") It was all chaste, thank GOD because if it wasn't I'd have felt pressured to intervene in some way. As it was, it was interesting to see who in the group held social dominance, who was observant enough of other kids' behavior to report on it and speculate about motives, and what they thought those motives were. It was also interesting to see who listened with big ears but didn't really participate. Si, for example, while he seems to have a relatively middle-to-high social status (this was a little hard to read at the party, since he was the host), didn't chime in with the trash talk at all. Oh, he listened, and laughed and groaned in all the right places. But he didn't have any stories about girls having a crush on him. (And although the fact that his MOM was washing dishes five feet away may have influenced the stories he chose to tell, this behavior tallies pretty well with the Silas I know and also my own personal growing-up self. I've never been very good at gossiping--oh, I can say the offhand snarky thing and/or put my foot in my mouth just like anyone else. But I've never been able to rivet others with stories of known-to-both third parties. In fact, Silas's game cluelessness about social snarkiness felt so familiar that for a little while I forgot that I'm a grownup and my own cluelessness doesn't matter any more.)

And when the kids were not eating, they played games, which was almost worse. Cops and robbers, mostly, only the group was lopsidedly distributed and COINCIDENTALLY the smallest, most outsiderest kids were the ones who had to be the cops when everyone played NOTIT and also had to use crutches and sticks as weapons instead of real nerf dart guns ("If this was real, the cops would TOTALLY have real guns," protested one cop-by-fiat, to which the robbers said, "But this is just a game." Which seemed to be kind of missing the point in a deliberate way.) In fact, the cops and robbers game was so on-the-edge with leftoutness that I called it off early (by using my sweet-yet-strict teacher's voice to instantly quell the meanies--I mean, ha ha, by ordering pizza. I had no other trick in my kid crowd control repertoire--clearly mistake #53 of the evening.)

Ugh. Basically it was fine. The kids were overall well-behaved and mostly followed directions and it is always illuminating to see which kids have the best manners training. I would do it again. In ten years or so.

Holy Horse, the Kid is Ten

2011-08-08T14:22:00.005-06:00

As of seven minutes ago, I have officially been a parent for a whole dang decade. That's a lot. That's also, as Si will soon be but is not yet irritated with me enough to point out, me making someone else's big event all about me.

When it's obviously all about this guy.

I left the house this morning before he woke up, but I've been in touch several times since then to a) wish him a happy birthday; b) receive last-minute instructions on what to pick up as party favors on the way home; c) receive modifications of those last-minute instructions based on a late-breaking cancellation; and d) receive notification that his great-aunt's birthday card had arrived in the mail--"She said that she's going to retire this year and come visit us," he announced. "I want to see her again."

"Me too, kiddo. I hope she does come visit."

"...And? She sent me a gift card? Not just to a place but a visa card? For one. zero. zero. In my haaaannnnd!"

"That's awesome!"

"I know. That's all I had to say. Bye, mom."

For someone who's been keeping close watch on his earnings lately and making plans as to how to best invest those earnings in Lego products, that's a whole lot of present.

When I did become a parent all those years ago, and in fact for several years before, this was the time I imagined. The ten-year-old times. This is the age when, according to Dr. Spock (I think), kids have the personality that most closely matches who they'll be as adults.

If that's the case, Si as an adult will be the kind of guy who says his idea of a great Friday night is to spend it at home with a close friend and a good book. Or a good video game. He'll like things to be neat and organized, although he will continually be surprised and vexed when they don't get that way on their own. He'll be good at getting his work done efficiently and going home--I'm guessssing he won't be an 80-hour-a-week kind of guy. He's not really a striver--somewhat at odds with his tendency to insist on being the one with the remote, but hey, that's what his teenage years are for. To work out the kinks.

He'll be kind, and funny, and not a complainer. He'll like making people laugh, but not necessarily being the center of attention. He'll be a man I'm glad to know.

Happy birthday, kiddo. It's been a good ten years.

So much to say, so little of note

2011-08-03T08:03:00.005-06:00

Sometimes I let this thing lag for so long I wonder if it's even worth it trying to catch back up.

Didn't care for the mineral water smell

And then I'm like, who am I kidding? What else would I do with all our pictures if I didn't have a blog?

Awesome glasses from a geocache

Where else would I get to talk about how we went to Yellowstone and saw four measly bison, petting-zoo elk (technically they were wild, in the way that squirrels are wild), lots of bubbling mud, some waterfalls, and a bear? It was rushed but fun.

The kids enjoyed it, more or less.

I think they liked the legos they brought along the best, and then the lake options at the cabin where we stayed, and Yellowstone Park features came in a dusty third, but, well, they can say they've been there.

And then I could tell you about how we've been back for a whole week. How I am a fresh expert on the return-to-work experience. First two days: learning how to do your job again. Second two days: putting out all the fires that erupted while you were out. Last day: whoo, it's Friday. Or how on Friday I rode my bike to work, which is almost becoming a Friday habit. Or how tomorrow we have eight boys ten and under arriving for a sleepover. On a work night. I am crazy.

There. All caught up. Now in my next post I can talk about how I can't get my mind around the fact that I've been doing this parenting thing for a whole decade.

Camp Report

2011-07-20T12:11:00.003-06:00

After a week of being a single-child family, Mike drove up and retrieved our other one on Friday, and now we're back to the two-child dynamic ("It's not fair that HE gets a sleepover and I don't" "Hey! You guys went to Starbucks! No fair!" "Silas is being MEAN to me!" "Helen won't stop BOTHERING me!" et cetera et cetera ad infinitum tunc nauseam) (incidentally the online English-to-Latin translator I chose is so slow I suspect that it is an unpaid intern in a cubicle, looking up the word in her Cassel's Latin dictionary). I was hoping that it would make it easier to cook dinner, what with no longer having to admire and comment on every single voluntary muscle movement of my daughter, but it really just changed the issue from one of having to provide continual fawning attention to having to provide continual mediation when one party requests fawning attention and the other party brutally declines to provide said service.

This is why having siblings is good for the character. Or this is what I tell myself as I rush down to the basement to break up another sobbing screaming fight. Over whether or not a certain Lego person is allowed to wear hair.

It does make dinner preparation more difficult.

By the time he got to me, Si had been asked how he liked camp so many times that he just kind of shrugged, but overall I suspect he had an awesome time and that he may have even found his medium, so to speak. His metier? Whatever it is when you find the place you're supposed to be. An abundance of scheduled, organized activities in which you can subtly show off without being the center of attention or having to really exude effort: that's my boy.

While his first day home he was noticeably more cheerful and polite, as though, I may have audibly hoped, he was actually well-mannered and behaved at camp and got into the habit of being so, by Monday it had worn off and he was argumentative and bossy as before. "What time are YOU going to bed, Mom? Isn't that pretty late? You know you need your sleep, and ten-thirty is pretty late."

This is less charming in person than it sounds on the screen and given that it is generally in reponse to a mild reminder to turn off his light soon comes across as a version of you're not the boss of me, mom. Two can play this "it's your bedtime" game, you know.

Summer continues apace. I am trying to ensure that we engage in iconic summer activities, such as popsicle making, that we did not manage to do last summer due to the kitchen's imminent demise. Right now it's really a race between iconic summer and weed growth, though, as every time I settle in to help with an activity I glance up and notice that the weeds in the backyard are closer to the door and are they supposed to be snarling like that? and have to rush out and yank some up lest they think they can just take over with no struggle at all.

Friday Favorites: Rain

2011-07-15T14:16:00.003-06:00

Let me try to resuscitate my regular Friday thing here with this tribute to rain, which I love, although we have been receiving it in quantities and velocities that I find it harder to appreciate.

My favorite things about rain:

1. The smell. Of course. Although it turns out that if it rains every day and every night for a week and a half, the smell is less "fresh pine forest" than "underside of mushroom."

2. The way it makes the yard grow and grow and grow. All our plants are bounding forth from the earth, in startling abundance.

3. The sheer awesome power of a deluge. I mean, even if I am kind of horrified at how the water is pooling up and washing away (goodbye, landscaping! Goodbye, compost! Goodbye, woodchips! Goodbye, edges!), it's still one heck of a show, these afternoon storms we've been having. Every morning brings its own surprise (wow! I didn't think that the puddles would reach that high!)

4. Sitting in the house/office/car and feeling smugly appreciative of modern systems of enclosure.

5. The excuse to bring a child into bed, just like the old days. When they were smaller. And fit in the bed. This one is kind of double-edged.

6. The inexplicable way it makes the end of the world feel farther off (in contrast to drought, which makes the end of the world feel right on our doorstep).

All said, I'm still crossing my fingers that today's the day we get NO rain.

Now with photos

2011-07-12T19:55:00.009-06:00

Apparently it's been too much to write a post AND upload photos, so here are the photos from the last two posts:

From camping:

Si with fish (Helen, seeing the photo: "And you didn't KEEP it?!")

The kids did some archery at the campsite, too.

Helen wants her own bow.

The next weekend (note: meaning we've gone up into the mountains three weekends in a row, a delight I did not think was possible) we dropped Si off at camp:

It was a little bleak.
But not too bad.

What is UP with me lately

2011-07-11T13:16:00.003-06:00

The rain. The rain is what is up with me. I get that rain is good, that I haven't had to water the lawn in over a week and hurrah and, furthermore, it will end as all weather things do and we will go back to all dry all the time and also HOT. (Okay, we are in fact back to HOT). But: the rain messed up my weekend, and I am NOT HAPPY. Specifically, the rain made a perfectly easy and sensible project, painting (some more of) the house, suck all of the non-accounted-for time out of Sat & Sun. To wit: Sunday I woke up and prepared myself for my weekly long run, as is my wont. Except that as I was tying my shoes and otherwise puttering toward Start, I happened to get that itchy, let's-think-about-those-clouds-and-how-they-might-impact-my-plans feeling, and that feeling led to a decision to switch the order of things, from run-then-paint to pain-then-run, which was fine, except that the paint part ended up taking up all of the paint and run time...and I guess maybe what I'm really mad about is the painting.

Augh will I be glad when the painting of the house is fini. It seems like it is neverENDING.

The other reason I felt a little pressed for time on Sunday was that we had to leave after lunch to bring Si up to his first-ever overnight camp. One of his best friends is also attending (they're sharing a bunk bed, in fact), and they've got about a million fun things scheduled, from baseball to archery to rain to canoeing to campout night to rain to horseback riding, and fun counselors that actually seem focused and attentive, like they might remember his name--but I still said, as we drove away, that I was SO VERY GLAD that my own personal days of sleepover camp are over. It just...has that overtone of bleakness. The too-hot, slightly mac-and-cheese-smelling dining hall. The bare-bones cabin with the plastic mattresses. The cabins that used to be snugly nestled in a cool pine forest but now, thanks to pine beetles and blowdown, are scattered across a bare, stump-studded field.

Si was enthusiastic about it, though, or at least a good sport, and by the time we'd gone back to the car and returned with his Harry Potter book he was deep in a game with his friend and barely looked up to say goodbye. So that's all good (but I will be glad to have him home, and to have school back in session and everybody in their place and predictable while I'm at work).

In defense of fireworks

2011-07-06T09:25:00.010-06:00

We'd planned to go backpacking over the holiday weekend but at the last minute couldn't bear the amount of packing that would have to occur, not to mention the drive, the food planning, and etc. Fortunately, though, Si had a backup plan in reserve (and fortunately for family harmony we decided to accept his plan; whoo boy is the kid a planner/control freak). In brief: Saturday camping; buy fireworks on the way home Sunday; Sunday evening dinner-fireworks-sleepover with friend TBA; Monday attend the real fireworks at Cornerstone Park. The friend TBA didn't quite work out, but luckily we had Cousin instead and we spent Sunday evening sitting in lawn chairs and watching the boys light brightly packaged gunpowder on the street in front of us (and having our eardrums strained alternately by the fireworks and by Helen's delighted screaming). Monday morning bright and early we got the hand-delivered neighborhood newsletter, which of course had as its very first item the reminder that in our city fireworks are illegal, punishable by a $1000 fine. The second thing I noticed was that the hand-deliverer would have had to walk past the pile of discarded fireworks trash left prominently at the end of our driveway. I may have muttered an annoyed imprecation about how the last ones to come inside could have cleaned up a little and what the hell were they thinking. I may also have cursed the fact that I married a man who likes fireworks and produced a child who also likes fireworks.

But then I readjusted and set my grumbling on the proper target: the anti fireworks brigade.

Before I begin, let me emphasize: I do not like fireworks. If I were a single parent, my children would have to content themselves with the state-sanctioned event at the park on the 4th of July.

But. I'm not a single parent, and furthermore, I happen to have a child who loves fire, explosions, and busting stuff up. These are mighty powerful urges and I'm starting to learn that growing up, and teaching a child how to grow up, involves learning how to channel powerful urges in socially acceptable ways. Duh. And I'm going to submit that option A, the option provided by the City and County and not least by our neighborhood nagging association--namely, that all urges are bad and should be vigorously stifled--is not productive.

I'm not going to argue with the City and County bans, which are based on the need to prevent massive grass fires and barn burnings and teenage maimings and blindings (although I'll point out that there are plenty of dangerous-but-fun/useful things that we DO manage to monitor and accomodate instead of ban, like swimming and driving and GUN OWNERSHIP FOR THE LOVE OF PETE) (also that the ban extends to sparklers).

Nope. I'm going to go after the neighborhood ban, which seems to be based mostly on "OMG they're so annoying" and "don't you know those are against the RULES?" These statements are both true, of course, but if we're going to be cracking down on annoying things, I'd like to point out that I find sparsely-planted geraniums VERY annoying, and also the widespread use of broadleaf herbicide. But nobody's going after those practices.

And, okay, 1-am firecrackers are their own special brand of annoying. Even 9:30-pm firecrackers are more annoying than geraniums. But it's like when the neighborhood nagging association lobbied (successfully, unfortunately) to curtail the post-school gathering of teens in the local playground: people, a community is for everyone. Not just the quiet types who prefer to stay indoors or take a brief constitutional walk in the open air. If you have teenagers in your community, and thank god we do, you're going to need to accomodate their desire to congregate and engage in loud and annoying behavior. Ideally, you're going to do that while teaching them how to be loud and aggregated without starting in on self-destructive and criminal behavior.

Likewise, we have a lot of explosion-loving people in our neighborhood (like, you know, BOYS.) I'd like to see us (read: YOU, neighborhood nagging association) come up with a way to help them indulge their explosion urges while learning how to be relatively safe and courteous about it. That's hard to do if the only option is "no. Also no, and no. And don't even THINK about poppers."

For me, I do this by sitting tolerantly in a lawn chair while my beloved coaches my other beloveds in the safe(ish) use of fireworks, and only wincing sometimes. And then making my beloved child go out there early the next morning and clean up the mess.

And yes, you might make the argument that if I didn't have an explosion-loving boy, I would probably be more-or-less in the anti-firework camp. But even then I'd still argue for the need to be a little more tolerant of non-toe-the-line activities.

Because otherwise, I might be tempted to get there and ban badly planted geraniums.

Brief update

2011-06-30T16:30:00.006-06:00

So, we went camping last weekend. We forgot our sleeping bags and ketchup for the hot dogs; it was hot and dusty until it got really very cold, and when we got home there was an entire weekend's worth of chores to do, plus extra laundry and dishes from the camping. Nonetheless it was wonderful and I enjoyed every minute of it, except perhaps the moment we made the discovery about the sleeping bags ("Oh what a SHAME!" cried Helen and collapsed in misery.)

The kids spent almost every minute climbing in the rocks behind camp

except when they were geocaching

or melting their matchbox cars in the fire. Helen was well-dressed throughout, except when wearing her hot polyester nightgown. Silas was basically invisible, except when waving from some high rock. I read, and cooked a bit, and tried to nap (too hot). The mosquito level was fine.

Chore report

2011-06-15T09:47:00.004-06:00

Well, the first shaky/whiny/frantic (how will we DO it all) week of summer has passed, and naturally we haven't actually carved out any sort of routine that makes sense, but things do seem less frantic. The kids are in their school daycare program for part of this week (rather more dismal than not, with full-group punishments for untattled transgressions and a distinct limit on outdoor time), and then onto their aunt's for hedonistic fun, sun & legos. I'd feel worse about the school daycare except that it is looking to be about 6 days total of the whole summer, maybe less, and one day of each of those is a swimming day (for which I say, Better you than me, daycare, and also: good luck!) Meanwhile, M and I are both getting a decent amount of work done and not feeling too compromised, and the kids...well, they'll be fine. If I were home full time they would get more sleep, but they would also spend more hours of the day engaged in saying "I want a PLAYYYYDAAAAATE" and "Is it ten yet? Is it ten yet? Is it ten yet?" and "I want to go swimmmmiiing" and probably a lot of "It's not FAAAAIIIRR." So. And they would DEFINITELY spend less time at the pool, per visit (they were there for THREE HOURS. As IF).

We're taking advantage of the summer schedule to work a few more chores into the kid routine. This has had mixed success. To elaborate:

1. Success: lawn mowing. Silas mows the lawn now. He gets five dollars if he mows the lawn without requiring nagging. If I have to remind him more than cursorily, he gets $4. If I have to do it myself, he gets nothing (obv). So far (for three weeks) this has worked quite well, and for the first time since owning a lawn I do not regularly have to mow it. Yessss.

2. Fail: getting the kids to pick up after themselves/ pick up activities before moving on to the next activity. This pretty much does not happen without M or I standing over them saying "and now THAT lego, please. No, don't build with it. Just put it in the box." The summer is young, however.

3. Mixed: dishes. We don't really have a fixed schedule for this, so the kids always feel like we spring it on them at the end of a long day ("I see you're tired and just want to play wii--how 'bout you load the dishwasher instead?") However, they've gotten to where they (mostly) remember to put their dishes on the counter, and if we prompt gently, into the dishwasher.

4. Mixed: room cleaning. We have a fixed schedule--every weekend, they have to clean and vacuum their rooms--but there is so much variation in the definition of clean (floor only, or surfaces too? bed made? do the shelves/desk need to be organized? what about that drawer of doom which is crammed so full of crap that it barely opens--yet which seems to contain many critical items, such as allowance and favorite hair thingies?), plus "weekend" is such a long, leisurely span of time that it's easy to find ourselves at 8:15 on a Sunday night without it having managed to happen at all, that this chore seems to involve more than its fair share of stomping and flinging oneself to the floor, or shocking requests to delay completion/ solicit help.

5. Mixed-to-success: putting away laundry. Sometimes I put a basket of clean, folded laundry in a kid's room and it is whisked away into drawers as if by magic. Other times I find myself tripping on it three days in a row as it first gets rifled for preferred clean clothes and then, confusingly, overpiled with freshly dirty clothes. In either case, I would like to involve the kids in this chore earlier.

We're trying. Ideally, I'd like all chores to be like the lawn mowing, in that they're required to happen, but my needing to remind kids to do them has been cleverly excised from the process. In other words, I'd like a little more ownership of the chore process from the children. I remind them frequently of that study from Harvard about how the kids who made the happiest adults were those who were required to do chores as children; however, I suspect this invigorating story translates to kidspeak something like this: "blah blah blah blah no, you can't play Wii now blah blah blah blah."

Field trip

2011-06-05T21:59:00.004-06:00

Over Memorial Day Weekend I took a little trip by myself (I KNOW); I went down to Salida, CO to take part in an Artposium. Mostly my taking part involved sitting in a chair or sitting on the steps by the river soaking in the sun, which was all right by me. I also did a little catching up with artist/ writer friends from around the state. I read some of my words to an assembled crowd (sounds downright Thomas Paine-ish, don't it?). I went for a hike and took notes and brainstormed ideas and processed.

I was glad to get away, to talk about something besides is-your-homework-done and how-are-we-going-to-get-to-baseball and the ripening drama that is the baseball experience this season--is coach X the right coach and are the practices too negative and why is coach y's son being favored for all the best positions even though his baseball skills are not great and ARGH (we had dinner with fellow BB parent friends last night and that is ALL WE TALKED ABOUT. For FOUR STRAIGHT HOURS. "I'm thinking it would be nice to have some couple friends that aren't through kids," M remarked this morning.)

I was also glad to get back, although as usual the readjustment/ catching up that always follows any kind of excursion away from home meant that life was even more hectic than usual last week. Hence the silence here.

One interesting aspect of the trip: anxious to conserve funds, I stayed at the local hostel. The kind with communal bunkbeds. It was...conducive to getting up & getting out early. While it was nice not to have the faceless DaysInn experience, and I did feel even more connected than I usually do in going to these things (the hostel was full of young marathoners and 18-year-old kids fresh into town for Southwest Conservation Core jobs--a distinctly different crowd than the middle-aged artist-writer-activist types at the Artposium), I pretty much dreaded go back there at the end of each night.

I've concluded that I'm really more of a B&B personality. Same unique local flavor, 100% less plastic mattress and middle-of-the-night internal debates about whether it's worth turning over and waking somebody up and then having to listen through the dark to them listening to me in the dark.

Anyhow. I'm back. Today is the Helen's last day of kindergarten!

Also: so Si's class did what they call a mini society project, where each kid makes a slew of cheapie cheap products (painted rocks with glued on googly eyes was a hit, apparently). Si's choice of product was a "mini Mt. Everest," which, according to the market research he did in class, would be popular and would sell for $20 each (in monopoly dollars, that is). M and I were both a leeetle skeptical of the validity of his focus group, since the Mt Everests were actually plastic egg cups painted white, but he was adamant, and since clearly the point of this thing isn't to have your parents sweep in and take over, we let it go. Sure enough, when he actually brought the products in, no one was interested. Last minute panic and origami-paper-buying ensued, but after the dust settled and the Mini Society buying and selling fest took place, Si ended up selling exactly one (1) Mini Mt Everest, and that was to his teacher. He was mildly indignant--"I don't get why someone would want to buy a painted plastic egg but not a Mini Mt Everest"--but didn't seem too broken up about it.

Helen, however. She was distraught. She has come back to it two or three times, weepily. "WHY didn't anyone buy the Mini Mt Everests?" "Why did they like the painted plastic eggs better? That's NO FAIR" and "If Dad had brought ME to the Mini Society I would have bought one."

It's both touching and baffling. I tend to cynically blame her distress on the fact that a blow to Silas is a blow to her own status (HE couldn't care LESS about her successes/ triumphs--why should he? He's the oldest. She could be star of the school play, an award-winning gymnast and a precocious polymath and he would still get to be the big brother). However, I think that also she's more sensitive to his feelings than I am. This is weird to say. But I think Si puts on a brave face to M and me--oh, it doesn't matter. He's fine. It's no big deal, right? Could I play some Wii now?

But Helen knows better. She knows his feelings are hurt, and her feelings are hurt for him. Which is both sweet and potentially useful.

The one with the dolphins on it

2011-05-24T10:39:00.004-06:00

I grew up in southwestern Ohio, along the northern edge of tornado alley. Or perhaps this is beyond the edge of tornado alley and is only the tornado...sidewalk. Or something. In any case we had regular tornado drills at school, and a handful of full-on go-sit-in-the-locker-room tornado warnings. Every so often, like once or twice in fifteen years, a tornado actually touched down and did damage in the vicinity. Very little, though. Nevertheless, I had a fully developed tornado phobia. I had a subscription to National Geographic World and one summer they did a special feature on "maxi" tornadoes, with lots of graphic footage from one that had touched down in Texas. I hid this issue away under all the other ones and whenever I'd come across it--it had a cheerful blue and green cover with dolphins--I'd get a hit of that hot, too-still, pre-tornado dread and shove it back. I think I became somewhat of a panicked pain in the neck anytime it got windy, and camping with me--we did lots of camping, one of the highlights of my childhood, despite the fact that it was sometimes overcast--was often an exercise in patient explanation about weather conditions and why a faint cloudiness did not mean we had to head directly for the concrete bathrooms. I remember being carried out screaming into a rainstorm once, because someone waiting with us in the lobby of the Sears had mentioned tornadoes. I think I was ten. Perhaps I was more like five. Either way, I was old enough to feel, as I was carried out bodily, that I was maybe a little too old for such carrying on. Nevertheless, I carried on. I couldn't help it.

It is not a coincidence that I now live in a location that is functionally tornado-free.

So it is with mixed feelings--relief and empathetic dread, mostly, and also sorrow, that I watch the storms blow across the fields across from my office. Cool dry air from the Rockies, heading east to meet up with the warm humid air of the Gulf and cause trouble...but not here. Good luck, all my midwestern friends & readers. May your basements/closets be strong and the tornadoes twist elsewhere.

I'd like to say that this childhood phobia helps me be more patient and kind with my own kids' phobias. It does a little, I suppose. But mostly I get exasperated with their fears of spiders and thunder and the dark, and if I have to carry them bodily somewhere I am only about 1% compassion, compared with 90% irritation (and 8% embarrassment, with a healthy 1% of "other").

Hawks, meadowlarks and killdeer

2011-05-19T07:50:00.007-06:00

It's spring, all right. And while this means that yes, it's rainy, and when it's not rainy, it's cold, and the mountains are so socked-in with clouds that Denver's true nature as a high plains city is starkly apparent, it also means that the birds are out. And the benefits of being in a newish building in a place that's still half wild and abandoned ranch are becoming apparent. I pass six or seven meadowlark territories on my fifteen-minute lunchtime walk, nesting kestrels, nesting killdeer, magpies and a prairie dog town. There's also a trio of Swainsons's hawks whose exact family relations I am trying to work out--I'm assuming two adults and a grown offspring, but really, who can tell? And you don't want to over assume these things. On Monday I went birding before work and while my basic take-home experience was it was so bleeping cold, it was still awesome. And I saw lark sparrows, a grasslands treat. As I drove from there to work I found myself flickering into an old seasonal excitement about the unfolding of a new place. And it seems like forever since I've felt that--or, well, since 2008, when we moved, and a new place was unfolding before us.

That feeling has mostly sloughed away and this week has been marked more by heaviness and low-boiling dread--this rain, I think, and also panic over the approaching end of school. The unstructured deliciousness of summer sounded great back in February, when every day is a slog of is-this-Tuesday-then-we-must-be-having-chicken-soup sameness, but now, as it roars up upon us, all I can imagine is summer's daily chaos. Last year we did too much camp, so we've neatly compensated by probably doing too little this summer, and I'm worried the kids won't get enough swim time, or exercise, or mental stimulation. I'm also worried they'll eat M alive, or if not him, then his ability to get any work done at all. I imagine nine straight hours of "STOP SAYING THAT" and "that's MY ice cream cone eraser" and "why does HE get a playdate" and "IT'S NOT FAIR!" Meanwhile I'll be at work, writhing in sympathetic suffering and feeling constantly compromised. Also wishing I could be at home to make sure everybody does their daily writing and page of math and reading and etc. Secretly I see summer as my chance to cram into the kids' heads all the things I think they might be missing during the school year and I am constantly irritated at how employment interferes with my ability to homeschool.

Good times. I must strenuously remind myself that in 15 years, when the kids have turned out how they're going to turn out, I will remember this state of mind as happiness. It's hard to believe, I know. But it's true. That certainty is a little magic pebble I keep in my pocket and touch now and then, for comfort.

Cozy

2011-05-15T17:01:00.004-06:00

Last weekend we had a woodstove installed. This week it finally got weathery enough to use it and we've had a few idyllic, or idyllic-ish, evenings by the fire. Supposedly this is a EPA-rated non-emitting woodstove (well, it IS EPA rated), but for a nonemitting entity it sure puts a lot of smoke out the chimney. I'm not sure if the average code-enforcing neighborhood nag would really know the difference between our nonemitting emissions and regular old emitting emissions, is what I'm saying. Hmph. We'll need to investigate this further.

We also managed to acquire the new version of Life (the game) and many spirited games have ensued--it's the kids' current favorite game and coincidentally the source of 90% of their sibling strife ("No, *I* want to be the Doctor!" "I don't WANT to take out $400,000 in loans!" "I don't WANT to lose my job!") (Welcome to the real world, buddy, I always murmur under my breath, and then I am VERY GLAD that there doesn't seem to be a "Get taken for a ride by unscrupulous/ incompetent contractors, pay $20,000" card. This game cuts a little too close to home as it is.)

In related hooligan news, Si and his friend and cousin set up a hot cocoa and coffee stand at the end of the driveway on Saturday, the crummy cold day of the neighborhood garage sale. It would have been marketing genius if a) they hadn't spilled, thrown and/or drunk most of the wares within the first 40 minutes; and b) sampling the wares hadn't caused Silas to turn into an obstreperous jerk ["Hey! Buy some coffee! Hey! We don't want your smiles, we want your MONEY!"] In retrospect we (the adults) probably should have wrapped it in a little sooner than we did. He verged on a neighborhood menace. This week we'll be having a manners intensive.

Whenever he behaves like this--which isn't really all that often--I am always filled with a sense of grim defeat, as though I've failed him somehow, or worse, ruined him. This sense is often significantly leavened by sheer irritation, although the defeat and the irritation both tend to the same end, which is lengthy (and useless) lecturing. It frustrates me to no end that the best response to this very age-approriate and unsurprising behavior is patience, calm repetition of the rules of mannerly conduct, and long-term practice. GAH! I just want a solution NOW and I WILL berate it out of you! This must work!

And then I wonder where he gets his obstreperous behavior FROM. Jeesh.

Mother's Day

2011-05-09T07:10:00.008-06:00

"You should be sitting back with a glass of tea today!" called out my neighbor as he passed me knee deep in clay on Mother's Day, digging out roots in the side yard where I am soon hoping to plant a cherry tree, some pumpkins, and an espaliered peach, among other things:

"Oh, I did that already!" I called out cheerfully, but really: hard manual labor, outside in the sun with eye toward a future of greenery and produce--you couldn't have gotten me to do anything else, yesterday.

My work from this time last year is starting to look established

if a little dry, now that I look at it. This photo makes me want to rush home and water those poor little seedlings.

Snow peas, arugula, spinach, radishes, carrots and cilantro, in case you're wondering. With rhubarb and daylily in the foreground. If the weather stays warm, I'll be planting summer squash and beans before the week is out, and hopefully next weekend I'll get my indoor seedlings into the ground.

We also did some of this:

And found this as we were getting our new EPA-blessed fireplace installed:

Woody. The sight of which made Helen instantly want a Woody doll, and also about seven other Toy Story-themed toys. She followed me around all day on Saturday with her notebook and marker in hand. "How do you spell Buzz Lightyear? How do you spell Lotso? How do you spell Santa?"

"Christmas is a long way off, kiddo," I reminded her.

"I know. I don't want to forget," she answered. "How do you spell SlinkyDog?"

Another Helen tidbit: two weeks ago she cornered me when I came in to read to her at bedtime. "What order are they in?" she demanded, pointing at a chorus line of Disney Princess dolls laid along the floor.

"In order of your favorite?" I answered.

"Nope. Tangled is my favorite."

"In order of the Disney movie release?"

"No. Need a hint? 'Ah...ah...'"

"... Aurora first?"

"Close. But why? Give up? Alphabetical order. They're in alphabetical order. Ariel, Aurora, Cinderella, Jasmine, Rapunzel, Snow White, Tiana."

Oh. Of course.

We Have a Biker

2011-05-05T21:36:00.003-06:00

Helen has officially lifted her feet from the ground onto her bike pedals for at least one complete rotation of the pedals to become a Person Who Can Bike Without Training Wheels.

Hurrah, and Go Helen, etc.!

In other Helen news, she recently started swimming lessons (again). Last week was her first lesson, and after our initial shock at the ...imaginative determination of the establishment (it's housed in an office complex; the two pools are aboveground rubber tanks set on the floor...which means that while there I'm unable to imagine anything but the impressive deluge someone could achieve with an exacto knife), I am pretty confident that this is the right place for her now. She, however, is maaad, because her class consists of her and two boys and the (awesome) teacher is a boy and also they "only do easy things." The swim place claims that kids advance up the levels at their own pace, so I hope they'll demonstrate this by advancing Helen soon (hopefully to the level with the other girl and also a girl teacher).

However, she's still mad. There's the issue of the boys, for one thing; also, her hair is still too short for braided pigtails that are both long and not spiky. Also, I asked her to put her bowl on the counter when she was finished with her oatmeal, please.

At bedtime we're reading Charlotte's Web, which I may have picked up partly to give Helen a little background and context to her favorite food group (meat, with an emphasis on pork products), which she eats gleefully, without a trace of remorse. We're halfway through, and the book's central impact is finally beginning to dawn:

"Why did they say that Wilbur's going to be killed, Ma?"
"Well...that's what happens to pigs."
Thoughtful pause. "So we can make bacon. And pork."
"And ham."
"And HAMMMM. Oh, I love all those things! But I love Wilbur, too."
My guess is that she would sorrowfully send old Wilbur to the chopping block.

*

The April report:

Nature and my hike: check and check. Thanks to our trip to Ohio, the kids have been glutted with nature exposure and I've gone on countem THREE hikes this month.

Wild foods: morels at my parents' place (yummm) and dandelion greens picked from the yard and put into salads. I can't say I've really warmed to dandelions. They still look so weedy that I can't make the mental switch from "quick, get the weeder" to "let's pick that for salad." Plus it just tastes like leaf to me.

TBR Pile: better work this month. I just finished Bill Bryson's At Home and am hard at work on Dr. Zhivago. Perhaps this month I'll be able to start something that has been on my TBR list since before Christmas.

Moon rise: fail. It was beautiful, clear, but happened at Helen's bedtime.

Spring trip

2011-05-01T21:25:00.012-06:00

Last weekend we took a trip east and visited with my parents. My sister came too (meaning that half this blog's readers were in attendance! Hi everyone!). This was one of those vacations that seemed like a good idea in January, when we bought the plane tickets--it's Easter! Obligations will be low! It will be spring! The Midwest is beautiful in spring!--and then the closer we got, the more misguided and downright reckless it seemed. The kids would have to miss two days of school--what was I thinking? M had a sudden onslaught of work-related obligations--why did I think that a vacation during the school year would even work? And then the weather was predicted to be rainy and miserable. As we headed to the airport in Thursday evening rush hour traffic, I was basically apologizing to everyone (note: the kids, after a brief moment of "what if they talk about something really important while I am gone?" panic, were not upset at all to miss school).

Neverthless, it was still spring: And the kids are finally old enough to purely enjoy the woods, without needing constant attendance and/or changes of clothes. They ran around for four days straight, in rain and cloudiness and even in the brief 20 minutes of actual watery sunlight we got on Easter day.

We visited the family compound of my childhood best friend, where Si got to swing on the old rope swing that flies out over this creek:

He also got to swim in that creek, in 50 degree weather, after he slammed into the concrete landing and lost his grip. Poor guy--but he recovered nicely and twenty minutes later was taking a lead role in the multifamily charades game (charades! --I was surprised at how fun it was, despite the slight overabundance of terms like "Resurrection" and "Good Friday." Our friends managed to mostly suppress their disapproval of our heathen ways).

The kids got to explore the woods every day, both with and without adults. I tried to instill in them an appreciation of the woodland wildflowers, which were out in force, but the kids were more interested in acorns, skeletons and mushrooms. I can live with that.

The mushrooms were spectacular, after all.

They also did a lot of frog and tadpole gathering--

(this guy is waiting with baited breath for the kids to GO HOME )

In the end, Si and Helen spent about fifty percent of their visit stalking the pond's wildlife. We actually bundled a slightly damp Helen straight from the pond into the car when it was time to go back to the airport.

In other words, it was pretty much a perfect visit. One which I wish we could make much more often.

Happy Monday!

Landing on Mars

2011-04-18T08:43:00.005-06:00

The other day, the family got to talking about space exploration and progress and how no one has ever been to Mars--yet.

"But they will, soon, though," said Si.

"Yes, they probably will--I bet in your lifetime people will land on Mars," said M.

"And I'll get to watch it! On HDTV 5!!!"

Pause. Cough. "Or, you know, you could BE one of the people who lands on Mars," said M, mildly.

"Oh. Yeah. I guess I could," said Si. Pause. "Or I could watch it on TEEVEE!"

My son: not a bold adventurer. Also, I think the prospect of imagining himself as an adult is not that thrilling to him. He'll watch the Mars landing on TV because that's what kids do, and he's a kid. The idea that someday he might be 35 and an astronaut doesn't really fit into his brain.

In contrast, Helen loves to imagine herself and everyone else older--"when he is 13, how old will I be? Nine? I'm going to be nine years old? Will he be in high school? Where will I be? THIRD grade?"

Even she, though, delighted to imagine, dedicated to improving herself at any skill that gets thrown her way ("Once I get over my fears, right, Mom?")--even she can't really picture herself on Mars. I mean, currently she's jump-jump-jump-jump roping up and down the sidelines at a baseball game, wearing a sleeveless dress and shouting "I'm toast! I'm a piece of TOAST!" while everyone around her huddles in blankets and down jackets--but if I were to entice her inside with some markers and give her a writing prompt, "How would I get to Mars?"--even she probably wouldn't come up with a drawing where she spends eight to twelve years in school, loading up on math and technology courses while angling viciously for those key summer internships at Lockheed Martin and NASA and engaging in competitive personal sports activities to prove her moral and physical fitness for the task.

I mean, that's the whole disconnect problem with careers, right? Si is probably right not to imagine himself too far--I suspect he intuits a lot more about the adult world than he lets on, and knows he's better off getting to it when he gets to it.

Or maybe that's what I tell myself since that's what I did, and now look at me. In complete professional fulfillment. Now I write things like this (warning: clicking here will violate the thin veneer of anonymity preserved on this blog--so, er, proceed accordingly).

Heading Home

2011-04-13T19:34:00.003-06:00

For the past three days I've been attending a work-related event in Minnesota, and tomorrow I head home and I AM SO GLAD. Even though the weather has been spectacular, the event has been (as ALWAYS) much better than I was expecting (although there was one brief moment at the final banquet tonight at which I happened to sitting at a table all by myself after it seemed that everyone else had been seated and I actually considered getting up to go pee and never coming back)(then a handful of the few people I knew at the event happened to come in THANKYOUPLEASE)--still, I miss everyone at home so badly. I will be so glad to get home, even though my day tomorrow entails two airplane flights, a few hours at work, a screech-over-to-the-school pickup followed by a hasty makeshift dinner from whatever happens to be in the fridge after my being gone for three days, a school meeting, and then a 4th-grade musical performance in which my nonmusical child somehow has a singing solo (which to my knowledge he has not yet sung, ever).

A few years ago, when I'd travel for work, I'd miss the kids in a visceral, physical way. I'd be sitting in a conference, starting to daydream a little, and imagine Helen sitting in my lap in her hot, sticky, gummy baby way. It was the most comforting thing imaginable (and it helped that it was only imagined, and was not actually accompanied by a real live child stage whispering in my ear and shrieking at inopportune moments and demanding to leave the moment things starting going well).

Now I miss the kids and M differently. Sometimes I get visions of disaster, but these mostly happen while I'm still at home, packing. Sometimes I miss them at night--but not always, because I'm usually completely knackered by the end of the day and secretly relieved not to have to nag anyone about brushing their teeth or engage in end-of-the-day conversation. When I miss them most is as I walk around--the waterfront here is beautiful, and I ache with the wish that they could all be here with me, experiencing it too. Or in the evening, if I'm not totally knackered, the hotel room feels empty and cold and I get furiously bored, despite the surfeit of books I inevitably bring.

So: tonight I am chew-my-arm-off bored, and tomorrow I will be snowed under with noise and needs and activities and people and I will probably look back on this very moment that I am writing in and feel a little bit wistful.

But not too much. Not too much, at all.

It's a Half Moon!*

2011-04-11T20:01:00.003-06:00

Blogging is like skiing: every time I manage to carve a little time out of my life to do it, I start stumbling over myself with excited vows about how SEE THIS ISN'T SO HARD and I'M GOING TO START DOING THIS MORE I SWEAR.

And then I get home and fall over on the bed, too exhausted to even unload all the wet and muddy gear from the back of the car.

Or something like that. The simile may have broken down at some point.

Maybe it's more like this: it sure is a lot easier to do when I do it regularly. Turn on the computer, log on, type up a little report about the state of my life right now: easy. Unless it's been two weeks, and then I'm torn between trying to catch the interwebs up on the fascinating minutiae of my life, and thinking, eh, it really wasn't all that interesting anyway--why do I bother with this, again?

For example: for about three weeks I've been listening to a biography of Queen Isabella (the She-Wolf of France, or the one who populated the weak royal line with Mel Gibson's baby, for those of you who, like me, draw much of your understanding of history from movies) (Braveheart was totally wrong on that one, BTW: she was about 11 and still in France when William Wallace was killed). I keep wanting to tell you guys all about it--how wronged this woman was. Also, lively details about how much/little money has changed since the 14th century: a jeweled crown given to Isabella as a gift was valued at about 40 pounds, which seems correctly low; what, then, to make of the modern-sounding bills such as 4,000 pounds spent on drink for one weekend (!) (for a crowd, but still--that's some party)? Or the trip to France that cost approximately 140,000 pounds? It makes our own expenditures of the past year seem positively spartan.

This is all quite possibly interesting--but is it really more interesting than all of the things I don't talk about? Like the fact that my parents were here for a week, or that we had our first-ever-in-the-new-kitchen dinner guests a few weeks ago, or that yesterday I had three elementary school parents over to bake muffins for our school's Muffins with Mom AND at the same time had three unrelated and one related but not of the household children over--and that I was both shy and unaccustomed to so much commotion, and also happy. We used to have crowds and craziness all the time--it was the way I finally hit upon of accommodating my introvertedness while not getting too isolated. Well, one way, anyway. And I missed it, and I am looking forward to doing this more. (And I am secretly hoping that getting back into the hosting scene will lead to the resurgence of other dormant parts of my life, such as the "having and seeing close friends reguarly" part, or the "being part of an artistic community" part. We'll see. Those involve more of a focused effort, which is difficult to pull off when I'm working full-time and being a baseball mom. Grog.)

Anyhow. I hope to be coming here more.

*A little boy out for a walk with his mom turned around and shouted this at me today. I'm not sure if he was just spreading the joy, or if he thought I might not be paying proper attention.

I do not like it, Sam I Am

2011-04-01T08:15:00.005-06:00

I do not LIKE April Fool's Day with ham. Or any other meat, or bread, or...

Aaaand that was really just a way to get the obligatory April Fool's Day nonsense out of the way. I suppose it is self-evident that as someone who thrives on routine and predictability, I would hate April Fool's Day pranks like the plague, but I still don't like being reminded that I am a dour and literal sourpuss.

Moving on. I will try not to think about how my poor mom is stuck alone at home with the kids on this potential-for-giddy-excess day (the kids' school district has managed to schedule Spring Break so that it covers April Fool's Day every year since we've been here. Coincidence? I think not...)

I'm beginning to settle into the new workspace, or more specifically, into the joy of being a shortish drive from work. Yesterday I rode my bike in, and although it was not the glorious exercise in joy that riding my bike to the old workspace was, the upside was that I wasn't toast by the end of the day. Six miles is pretty manageable. Yes, fine, I felt a bit like Ralph Nader as I rode my ancient, dusty bike through the Land O the Office Parks and Warehouses with my work pants tucked into my socks. But it felt like it could become a regular, if infrequent, part of my life. Once again I can be a bike commuter, with all the sweaty virtue that implies.

We're beginning to settle into the house space, too. It has been a blessed relief to give up on our irritating and needy contractor and just hire people who show up when promised, work hard, and finish the job with a minimum of fuss and drama (who knew? now we're wondering why the hell we stayed with the other guy for so long. Pity really isn't a viable business model, or shouldn't be). The trim, for example, was finished in a day. There are still unfinished spots, but we've brought out the furniture and arranged it as though things were done, and psychologically that makes a ton of difference. Plus: spring is nigh.

We finished up our ski season last weekend. Thank god. I'm all for skiing, which is good, considering how much time and resources we direct to the industry, but man, it's nice to have weekends back without the guilt of feeling like we should be spending them driving into the mountains to do something that involves so much lugging of heavy, finger-pinching equipment, with the added bonus of the day possibly ending in death/ serious injury. On the last two runs of the day, Helen finally talked herself into letting go of my hand while she skiied the bunny slope (note: I bribed her), and skiied down the hill faster than I could keep up. That's my girl, I thought, grinning madly as I chased the little pink snowpants down to the lift.

So: that was March. M took the kids to the creek at the bottom of the hill (nature exposure: check), we watched the moon rise as a family (we drove to Cherry Creek Park on the night of the full moon, and it was touching and heartening to see what a popular activity this was, with cars and pedestrians lined up all along the roads on the west edge of the park) (moon rise: check), I went for a hike in the Greenland Open Space on my day off (hike for me: check), and I struggled mightily through one of the books on my bedside TBR pile (I'm going to have to give this one a fail. It's been two months now, and I'm still on the second chapter of book 2).

Dislocation

2011-03-24T10:07:00.007-06:00

Last week my workplace moved, and this week marks the first regular work week in the new place. For most of the people I work with it's a bad change: we're 20 miles away from our old building, so people's commutes have doubled or even tripled. There is a lot of grousing and many people have suspiciously puffy eyes when they come in every morning, as if they maybe spent some of the drive in tears. Some people have gone from corner offices with wall-to-wall windows and close views of the nearby rocky ridge to windowless caves. Other people have had their job duties completely upturned and their daily work routines disrupted--"I feel like I've taken a totally new job," said one of my coworkers. "Everything is new." I try to keep pretty quiet. I think I technically live the closest to the new office (five and a half miles away, but still: the closest). I also have a bigger, brighter, newer office with new furniture, and what's more, the move was an excuse to toss out all my predecessor's files and books and knickknacks. So I am unobtrusively thanking my lucky stars/ office politics/ the powers that be for my situation. Nevertheless, it has been an adjustment. I find myself thinking idly of the walk I will take at lunch--and then remembering, with a small pang, that no, that walk is 20 miles away. People I used to see every day are located in offices I can't always reliably find. Everyone in my department has their own office, now, so that instead of being grouped in out former cozy circle we are spread along a wall--the casual interactions we used to have don't work anymore. It isn't bad. It isn't something that we won't all get used to and find the new benefits in. I, for one, am already right now reaping the benefits of having 30 to 40 minutes less commute time every single day. But the adjustment is still surprisingly difficult and it reminds me of how much of our internal equilibrium is based on external cues we're almost unaware of--like geography. Like circadian rhythms, which are going to change based on which way our offices face and whether we have access to circadian cues. Like...is this possible?...external vegetation. Our new office is located out in the midst of warehouses and rugged old ranchland. There's very little out here in the way of plant life except knapweed, scattered weedy cottonwoods and siberian elms, and occasional strips of bluegrass and landscaping trees. There are no houses and the offices tend toward the utilitarian. There isn't much in this landscape that is thought out, or that reflects attention to place. Or interest in place. I go for my lunchtime walk and it's beyond barren: it's desolate, windswept, neither human nor nature but some drosscape in between. I catch sight of my office building at the top of the hill and I have a little lurch of affection for it, like I'm sighting my covered wagon after foraging for buffalo chips. Aw, we're pioneers, I think, even though we're literally sitting between two demographically identical office buildings. It's interesting to think about the animal basis of all this, how some animals are so sensitive to changes in light, termperature, or smell that they'll up and leave a place if it changes too much. And even if humans are more akin to noise-and-change-loving house sparrows and racoons, we still get all discombobulated and grumpy when it's suddenly brighter or our room faces north instead of west. One problem with noticing the animal basis of my response to changing geographical location, though, is I start noticing the animal wrongness of my daily routine. Driving! Desk sitting! Working away from my family! It makes me want to up and leave, some days, and go in search of a daily routine that feels biologically better suited.

Life with a Fourth Grader

2011-03-21T22:35:00.003-06:00

Saying goodbye to his best friend: “See you Monday! Unless my house gets hit by a giant meteor!”

Friend: “Or someone drops a nuclear bomb on you!”

Silas: “Or World War Three starts!”

At bedtime: he sets up his big fluffy white bear next to him in the bed, the self-holding ammo nerf dart gun propped in its paws. “To protect me from monsters,” he explains, matter-of-factly.

Skiing: proceeding down the mountain at what could generously be called a conservative pace, he notes how much faster he is, now that dad’s taught him “that thing with the turn.”

When he gets mad at us, he storms into his room and turns up the volume on the only CD he owns: Beethoven’s greatest hits. Heh.

When problems arise, he takes matters into his own hands and often prevails. Except when he spectacularly doesn’t. See: attempt to remove superglue from beautiful new dining room table.

He can be stunningly responsible, like when he packed school lunch for himself and Helen the morning I was out of town and M was still in bed. He included fruit! And carrots and snap peas!

He comes into my new office/ hotel room/ etc. and within two minutes has discovered two drawers I never noticed, found the keys, locked them and unlocked them, and set the TV to some channel I'm not interested in. "Aigh! Don't MESS with everything!" I say, but don't press it, because, really, he's fine. Moving a million miles and hour and getting into everything, but fine.

Sometimes, raising him, I feel like I don’t really have a plan—like I’m not trying to shape him and guide him the way I ought to be, that I harp too much on low-consequence stuff, like video game time and the ratio of carrots to goldfish in his diet and not enough on helping him improve his friendship abilities or his staying power or his internal motivation. Other times I think I have too many goals for him, that I don’t listen hard enough to what he’s trying to be.

Other times, I think: he's fine. Just keep on going, and things will be fine.

Taking a break from researching TurboTax

2011-03-11T20:05:00.008-07:00

...to write a blog post for March. Good grief. March 11, already, and still I feel like my feet have barely touched the ground. Big work meeting, big work move (that will cut 20 miles from my daily commute--yay), complete halt of house progress, deadlines flying at me from every direction...and the start of baseball season. Taxes.

Sometimes I feel like I'm just holding onto the Red Queen as hard as I can, running breathlessly to stay in one place. Other times I'm pretty sure I'm the White Queen, shrieking about pinpricks that haven't happened yet.

Today I went in and volunteered in Helen's kindergarten class and it was one of the best things I've done in weeks. I helped them navigate a drawing program on their fancy little kid laptops ("Why isn't is making yellow?" "What do I do next?" "Why isn't it erasing?" "Isn't this drawing cool?")

I look forward to very little these days...it's less of a constant dread situation, though, and more of a not even having time to think about lunch thing. We haven't had dinner with friends or family in weeks (unless you count lunch at Red Robin between baseball games last Saturday...which, why shouldn't we? Those families are friends, too). I read to the kids almost every night--I do look forward to that. It's my way of being a mother cat to them still, licking them to sleep with words every night. It almost doesn't matter what the book is (Oliver Twist for Silas, which I think he is tolerating out of enjoyment for the word-licking than actually enjoying, and Farmer Boy for Helen).

It's a life, though, isn't it? Crammed so full to bursting I can't even tell what shape it is, most days, and I can't stand back from it enough to tell if I like it. I suspect that I do, though, and in three years, when the boy is almost a teenager and the girl has embarked on the perils of girl power plays, I know I will back on these times with a fond and aching heart.

And, lest I forget--I meant to update weeks ago--my February New Years' landmarks:

Moon watching--I watched the February full moon rise, slightly dimmed, through office buildings. This month I intend to find a better watching spot, if weather permits.

Books--No progress on the TBR pile. I can't hold myself back at the library, and end up with a side table sagging under the weight of library books with urgent renewal dates.

Wild eating--none in Feb. It's the Hunger Moon, after all, which for us in 21st century suburbia means Chilean produce and New Zealand meat, with a side of processed treats.

Leaping, plus updates

2011-02-21T11:04:00.004-07:00

When the kids were little, I remember their development would come in spurts--one day they'd be serenely practicing their "ba" sounds, in long unrelated streams of babble, and the next they'd wake up and say "dog" and be making signs for "flower" and "please" and "MORE NOW." This still happens, only we call it "mood," as in, "Wow, Si's mood is terrific today! He cleaned his room without being asked and played with Helen and finished his homework lickity split." Helen had a growth moment over the weekend, and even though she gets embarrassed and shouts MOM DON'T SAY THAT whenever I praise her about it, I can't help myself. We had to go to the store on Saturday, and she offered to go if we could walk/ scooter (gasp) (this from the girl who two days before had a crying fit because I hadn't parked the car close enough to the school for her to roll from the Sock Hop to her carseat). So I said yes, of course, even though it was the main grocery trip and I'd have to lug home all the cereal boxes and milk jugs and etc. Then on the way home, after I'd had to stop for the eighteenth time to adjust the damn cereal boxes, which were spilling out onto the sidewalk, she spun back on her scooter and said, "Can I help? I can carry a bag."

"Oh, that's sweet of you," I said. "But these are really heavy."

"I can take one," she said decisively, like a 22-year-old. And holy mama, she did. She took the bag with the three-pound chicken and looped it over her scooter handlebars and off she went.

I upped her allowance, of course, even though all she asked for was brownie points (I'm aware of the unfortunate racist heritage of the term, but our kids naturally assume they're related to brownies, so I don't worry about it too much).

Updates: well, our contractor is finally our of jail (I do love saying this in answer to people's chipper questions about how the renovation is coming), but not for long, so we're trying to get him to finish as much as he can before he goes out of commission. Sigh. I feel bad for the guy, even though he brought the vast majority of his troubles upon himself.

Also, Kevlar was invented by a woman.

Men who cry

2011-02-07T08:27:00.003-07:00

Good morning on this glorious wintry Monday. It's hard not to be in a good mood when the sun is out for the first time in a week. (Or so it seems, and I know that for my Midwestern contingent a week is NOTHING. Still: GLORIOUS.) Last week, with the cold and the snow and the wow-really-MORE? snow, it felt like everything was in hibernation. The kids had two snow days, one of which was for cold (WIMPS, that school district. WIMPS.) (Okay, the high WAS -1 and they were worried about buses not starting). M and I, on the other had, had business-as-usual days (ARGH), so the snow days were 48 hours of frantic scrambling. Our builder, too, seemed to be asleep--he was in a fender bender on his way to work on Monday, which was followed by 7 days of silence and complete non-progress on the house. We finally tracked him down at his mom's house. Apparently his girlfriend had broken up with him and kicked him out of their house. Sigh. We have a very....emotionally connected builder, which I appreciate on the good days but not so much on the weepy ones. On those days I am reminded of Nora Ephron's warning about men who cry: "they're sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own."

Heh. In addition, our compassion is strained by also finding out last week, via a legal notice informing us that we're responsible (legally we are, it appears) for the unpaid bills to some of his subcontractors. LOVELY. I would be more distraught about this disturbing turn of events if a) the amount we're being requested for was larger and b) if I wasn't pretty confident that we could meet that debt by selling his damn stuff, which is still in our house. (Just kidding! that would be WRONG. As would some of the fantasies I entertained over the weekend of kidnapping him and not letting him leave our house until the trim was done). Anyway! It seems like he's come out of hibernation and will be coming to our house to face the wrath of M. I do not envy him.

In lighter news, Si's fourth grade class has begun their biography project. "Oh, who are you doing?" I asked with interest. Ben Franklin? Buzz Lightyear? Amelia Earhart?

"The man who invented the bulletproof vest."

Of course. One of the great minds of our times. I resisted sarcasm, however, and just said, "Oh! Great!" while making a serious effort not to sound like a pin had just punctured my mom balloon.

January progress

2011-01-31T19:55:00.004-07:00

Today was the last night of skating lessons and I just must say that I have NEVER been so glad to see the end of lessons in my life. Between the frantic dash after work to get home, pick up the kids, eat something, stuff Helen into her snowpants and gloves (which usually entailed dragging said snowpants and gloves out of their hiding place in the winter clothes bag), and convince both kids that yes, the lessons were still on and YES, we really are going, yes, even you, now get GOING, I would start dreading it three days in advance and it would kind of mar my weekend.

On the plus side, between skating, basketball, and run of the mill busyness, January passed quickly by and here we are on the brink of February. It's time for a little assessment of the resolution situation. Let's see. I resolved to read a TBR book a month, watch a moonrise, take the kids to nature and eat more wild food.

Let's start with the wild food:

Berries of the Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) growing in our backyard (it TOTALLY counts.)

Pork roast studded with juniper berries.

Waiting to eat the pork roast. And the chocolate-pecan torte (mmmm). And the roasted potatoes and steamed carrots & snow peas. (Can you tell I'm a little happy to have a kitchen back?)

I'm not totally sure that I detected the flavor of juniper berries in the pork--I mean, basically it tasted like pork, right?--but oh, I felt downright self-sustaining and virulently virtuous, collecting the berries that were scattered in huge heaps in our yard (we have a very fecund juniper). Next I'm going to try roasting the berries and using them to infuse milk for ice cream. I'll let you know how that goes.

Book: I read Tender at the Bone. Okay, fine, it had been sitting on my TBR pile for all of about 14 days when I picked it up, but still: off the list. I have to admit that the book made me quizzically jealous--so, wait, she just sort of stumbled into this dreamy life as a food writer? In which she got to, say, decide on the spur of the moment to travel to France to learn about wines? Some essential piece of this puzzle seemed left out. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book immensely, drooling as I read (lots of recipes).

Moon: well. January 15, the night of the full moon, was totally socked-in snowing. The next day Helen had her kindergarten program during the moon rise, and the days after that I sort of forgot (but did happen to be walking the dog shortly after the moon rise). Fun fact: the January full moon is called the Wolf Moon.

Nature: took the kids and a friend down to the creek at the bottom of the street. The friend fell in; Si and Helen also got suspiciously soaked. They also had to be dragged away from the creek, despite it being a) twenty degrees out; b) getting dark and c) a sopping-wet clothes situation. So I'll rate that one a success.

Next: February!

Ahh, the bowl fight

2011-01-28T13:14:00.003-07:00

Yesterday our builder hooked up the kitchen faucet, which means that except for the really actually minor items like caulking and grout, the kitchen part of our house is D-O-N-E and we celebrated by baking a batch of cookies, which we haven't done since 1984. I mean, August. Helen was beside herself with chit-chattery excitement, spinning from mixing bowl to counter to oven and back again with a constant running commentary: "Aretheydoneyet?WhencanIlickthebowl? But Silas can't lick the bowl, right, because he wasn't here? What's that for? Are they done yet? Did you do the next batch? When you do the next one can I lick the bowl? Just me? I'm going to get a spoon. Just for licking, right, ma? What are these spoons for? Can I lick the spoon? But Silas can't, right? Are we going to have parties now? Whoa."

Meanwhile M and I were trying to have a conversation about how great it was to finally stand in the kitchen and have a conversation, Costi was trying to make the point that we hadn't fed her her after-dinner snack yet, and the birds (oh, the birds) were back in the living area, making their happy-to-be-here noises, and it was all so cheerful and noisy and warm that there was really no excuse for feeling tired and irritated, even though that's what I was mostly feeling.

Life is creeping back toward normal, in other words. Hurray. This was really brought home by the kids who, immediately after the celebration cookie baking, got into a fight over who got to lick the bowl (note: they BOTH get to lick the bowl. For Pete's sake.)

Dog Ambition

2011-01-19T08:38:00.005-07:00

Said an expert about the border collie, Chaser, whose owner taught her to recognize, nose, paw or fetch 1,022 different objects: "It is not necessarily Chaser or Rico who is exceptional; it is the attention lavished on them."

In other words, around the world there are millions of border collies languishing in undeveloped desperation, just waiting for their owners to get with the program and start spending four to five hours a day training them.

....Now? NOW? ....How about now?

Cleaning

2011-01-17T10:34:00.002-07:00

I spent my weekend in productive manual labor. Between the shop vac, the mop, the dust rags, and my lungs, GRUG, I carted about 20 pounds of accumulated dust out of the basement.

These are days I love to hate. Ugh, I might say, flopping down on the couch, ALL I did today was clean the basement. I didn’t get anything DONE. I ignored my children, neglected my mind, cooked hurriedly and without relish. I was indoors all afternoon under less-than-salubrious conditions. A life can get sucked into this sort of absorption, and all kinds of better priorities can get misplaced. I vaguely mourn the books unread, the lush and incisive paragraphs unwritten, the complex soups unsimmered.

Still. There is a higher dimension to this type of labor. The very little I know of Zen Buddhism reminds me that sweeping, scrubbing, and similar tasks are considered spiritual exercises. Maybe it’s metaphorical: tackling a minute corner of the world’s mess (even though all I really did was rearrange it, sending the dust bucket by bucket into the flower beds outside and the trash out to the landfill on the prairie). Maybe it’s more direct: straighten and clean the exterior, and something internal straightens and settles down, too.

All I know for sure is that there are few things in life as satisfying as an object cleaned (with the exception of objects constructed, an activity that I engage in far less frequently and with much more mixed results). Yesterday morning when I finished up my coffee, the basement was a toxic mess of 40-year-old cobwebs, drywall remnants, sawdust, reverse drain residue and lingering insulation fibers. By the time I sat down to dinner, half was clean and usable. I spent my evening nipping over to the basement stairs to admire the well-wiped surfaces and dust-free toys. I went to bed feeling satisfied and tired.

The best thing of all about cleaning the basement, though? Once it's done, it'll be done for a good long time.

Dilettante

2011-01-14T09:54:00.001-07:00

During the 20 or so years of my adult life, I have been accustomed to thinking of myself as an expert. Generally there has been very little evidence to support this stance, although I have made ambitious beginnings in a wide range of subjects. I believe my self-assessment comes in large part from periodically rubbing academic or professional elbows with people who either were at the time or who later became, through dint of perseverance and attention, experts.

For example, during high school I devoted myself almost exclusively to music and British literature. To this day I experience an agony of inarticulate familiarity when I listen to the radio: "Hey!" I'll cry to family members, "I've played this piece! We must have worked on this exact section about thirty times--it's really hard to play in tune!" What I won't be able to recall, however, is the name of the piece or who composed it. Likewise, I have a solid grounding in the classics of English literature, although after 20 years my actual knowledge of the contents of these classics has become very dim (Macbeth is about...a man who murders someone? With the help of his wife? Who gets blood on her hands and has a hard time washing it off? Out, out, damned spot!)

Or...during one very focused semester in college I read every historic document pertaining to the pre-20th century Ojibwa, or at least all the documents that had been published and then purchased by the Columbia University library system. I can't even remember what these documents are, just what they looked like and where, generally, they were found within the library.

Or...for several summers in my twenties I could name every bird that bred between 6,500 and 9,000 feet in the Colorado mountains, and identify them by song or call. I could also identify most of the plants.

Therefore, it has come as a rather rude surprise to reach age forty (or thereabouts) and be most accurately defined as a dilettante. I engage in most pursuits "sporadically, superficially, or frivolously;" I lack real commitment or knowledge of most subjects (and the subjects to which I am committed to are somewhat stunning in their triviality--the catalogs of which sidewalks in the neighborhood are most likely to be icy two weeks after a big snow; the state of my children's teeth; the proper usage of a comma according to the AP Style Guide).

Meanwhile, while I have restlessly skipped from subject to subject, my former peers have doggedly persisted in acquiring the depth and breadth of knowledge I have always admired, often imitated, and never really achieved. Former classmates whom I used to (shamefully) consider lacking in ability, or application, or the sheer imaginative passion necessary to really dive into a subject and make it one's own have become, shockingly, experts. In my current job, as the editor of academic manuscripts for a technical journal, this fact makes itself known to me on a daily basis. My email inbox is filled with messages from men and women whose grasp of the technical requirements of separating gangue rock from valuable ore, or designing an underground ventilation system that is both efficient and effective, or quickly suppressing a spot fire on a conveyor belt system, is vastly superior to mine--and (here's the rub, because I can't say I lie awake nights regretting my inability to match the proper teeter bed hydroseparator to the specific rock type found in a particular seam) the larger physical, chemical, economic, geologic and even political context for any and all of these specialized endeavors. If you had asked me at age 22 if I had any interest in becoming a civil engineer I would have thrown back my head and laughed. Yet if you'd asked if I wanted to gain a thorough knowledge of the structural, social, scientific implications of building a bridge--and, further, to develop an acquaintance with all of the varied people involved in such a project, and an understanding of the specific political climate surrounding the endeavor--well, I would have said yes. Definitely yes, just as soon as I finish trying (and failing) to teach myself Navajo.

Here's the thing, though: do I care? Most of the time, not too awfully much, although that's usually the low-grade exhaustion talking (sure I'm bummed that I never got around to writing the Definitive Guide to Native American Linguistic Evolution--but hey, who's up for a nap?)

Sometimes, though, I grow melancholic. I'll read the obituary of someone who made it his well-appreciated but completely unpaid business to drive all over the state and catalog every single Paleoindian site in the Rocky Mountains, and I'll think that sounds so cooool. I'll read an article about someone who devoted ten years to discovering and eating the root crops of the world, or became the state's unofficial expert on bats, or who wrote a book on a subject I briefly took a shine to and read two or three books about, and I'll get mopey for days, thinking that should have been me.

Whom do you envy? ask career counseling experts. It's a swift way to figure out what you want in life, or what you think is missing.

Well. What "whom do you envy?" doesn't help you answer is the next question, which is, "what are you going to do about it?"

I really don't know. For now, nothing. Embrace my inner dilettante, I suppose, while trying to stay the course on the project I started about nine and a half years ago, which is raising two kids with a reasonable amount of stability and attention. And dream of a day when I can, and hopefully will, hop into my car and call in sick whenever I hear of a great new...something, somewhere in the state.

Late-breaking resolution

2011-01-10T14:20:00.007-07:00

On this blissfully wintry day in January, I have an additional 2011 resolution to add: I'm going to (informally, and with the rules changed to suit my own purposes) be joining Roof Beam Reader's 2011 TBR Pile Challenge.

The goal of the TBR Pile Challenge is, in Roof Beam Reader's words, to finally read 12 books from your "to be read" pile, within 12 months. One of the rules of the official contest is that all of the books have to have been on my TBR pile for at least one full year, but I'm changing that because I got a lot of nice books for Christmas. No point in sending those to next year's TBR pile! However, I have plenty (PLEHENTY) of older books that can help round out this challenge. The key to the challenge is to post the list of 12 in advance, along with two alternates (in the event of a book starting to feel like punishment).

My list:

1. Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl

2. At Home, Bill Bryson

3. Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

4. Collected Short Stories of Raymond Carver

5. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

6. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

7. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace

8. Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion

9. Little Heathens, Mildred Armstrong Kalish

10. Aeneid, Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles
11. Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez
12. The Story Behind the Story (various)

Alternates:
Raw Edges, Phyllis Barber
The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiesen

You know what I love when it gets so cold, like it has been for the past few days? The way the mountains and foothills never seem to wake up. The snow on the trees and rock cliffs doesn't melt, so that white, closed look of wintry dawn lasts all day.

Update

2011-01-09T19:16:00.003-07:00

Attention: we are now cooking with gas.

Still no sink, running water, or counters, but the end is in SIGHT.

Resolve: Not Just for Cleaning Anymore

2011-01-04T10:12:00.004-07:00

I love New Year's resolutions! Other people's, my own, my kids' (fun fact: Silas announced his NY's resolution last week, which was to eat at McDonald's no more than three times--"or four. Four times OR LESS"--which revealed a logistical flaw in the concept of kid resolutions, because it's not as though he jets off to McDonald's any old time he wants. In order to fill his resolution, he's going to have to convince an adult to take him to McDonald's, and then convince said adult NOT to take him, a conversation which will probably result in a Certain Relative feeling the need to warn us again about the dangers of getting reported to CPS due to not letting our kids enjoy junk food, or some such.)

ANYWAY. My 2010 resolutions were:

1. To read a 2009-published work of fiction each month.

Done. See list below.

2. To hike at least once a month.

Done. Although the court would like to point out the "uh...barely" nature of the November "hike" (1/8th of a mile up a forest road during a run). Again, see list below.

3. To ride my bike to work at least once.

Done.

4. To take some early mornings in May and June and go birding.

Fail. May/June turned out to be way too fraught to take time to do anything.

I hereby announce my 2011 Resolutions:

1. Take the kids out into nature at least once a month.

(The creek at the bottom of the hill counts. Don't even get me started on the social forces that compel this to be an Outing, rather than an injunctive issued while I sit at home and do boring grownup things.)

2. Eat more wild food.

(By which I mean food of a gathered nature, not that I'm going to go out and invest in a hunting license. Also, weeds in my own yard count as wild.)

3. Watch the moon rise at least once a month.

4. Hike once a month.

Lots of activity-of-the-month action in this list, which tends to lead to a busy 30th, but so it goes.

2010 recap:

The hikes I took:

January: Frisco-Breckenridge Bike Path, 1.5 miles; Swallow & Coyote Song trails, 2 miles
February: Coyote Song Trail, 1 mile
March: Carpenter Peak Trail, 6.4 miles; Fountain Valley trail, 2 miles
April: Duluth waterfront, Lake Superior, 2 miles; Swallow Trail, 1 mile
May: Glendale Farm Open Space, 2 miles; Swallow and Coyote Song Trails, 2 miles; Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield, 1.2 miles
June: Meadowlark and Plymouth Creek Trails, 3.5 miles
July: Mt Bierstadt Trail, 4 miles; Caribou Pass and Columbine Lake trails, 6 miles
August: East Canyon Loop, 4 miles
September: Coyote Song and Swallow Trails, 2 miles
October: Coyote Song and Swallow Trails; Lyons Back Trail; 3 miles; Chatfield park trails, 6 miles
November: Vasquez Road, app. 1/4 mile.
December: Coronado National Forest, on and off-trail, 9 miles; Matthew Winters and Morrison Slide trails, 4 miles

The books I read (as part of my 2009 fiction project):

1. Amateur Barbarians, Robert Cohen
2. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
3. Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem
4. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
5. Tinkers, Paul Harding
6. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
7. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
8. The Help, Katheryn Stocket
9. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
10. Family Album, Penelope Lively
11. Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
12. Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro

Ten novels, two books of short stories. The one that kept me reading past bedtime the longest was The Help; the one that I was sorriest to have end was Wolf Hall; the one I found most exasperating was Chronic City (though I have to say it's stuck with me longer than many other books I enojyed more). The book that seemed to be teaching me the most about an unknown part of the world was In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

Overall, although I often felt constrained by the rules of the reading project, and sighed disontentedly at the library when I wanted to chose a book written in some other year, or wanted to pursue some new reading adventure that had caught my fancy, this project introduced me to books and authors I was grateful to find, and whom I probably wouldn't have read for many years to come. In other words: success. However, I don't think I'll repeat it for 2011.

From There to Here

2010-12-29T19:54:00.015-07:00

We went from this:

and this:

To this:

And finally this:It felt like the range and scope of our lives, sometimes. Most of the time. But still, there was this:

We went from here
To here

And spent time here.

All in all, it wasn't bad, 2010.

Holiday interlude edited to add pictures

2010-12-27T11:41:00.003-07:00

Merry Christmas, dear readers!

So much, of so little note, has happened since we last spoke. There have been birthdays! holidays! museum trips! family visiting! present purchasing! purchase regretting! present opening! There have been tantrums large and small, mostly from strung-out children, but also a few adults (okay, ME). Remarkably, the worst of the Christmas season has passed without any major family snarking. We are all still on speaking terms. The season has been good to us and ours. Dearly beloved people have come and gone, leaving the Melospiza household lonelier but less chaotic.

M and I, like the kids, had to make do with partially fulfilled wishes this season--we still have no kitchen, but on December 23 we got lights and power in the front half of our house and we quickly moved into Christmas Mode, hauling out the boxes of ornaments and nostalgia, stringing up lights, taking photos. We cleaned the trash out of the fireplace, drove nails into the 2x4 fireplace frame, and hung our stockings with care between the ShopVac and the table saw. We regifted some of our Christmas cookies to Santa and brought out rugs and pillows and camp chairs. We had a right jolly old Christmas morning. Then yesterday we took it all down again, in the hopes that the builders would come today as promised (as of a quarter to noon, no dice--our builders are like the bad boyfriend, the one who never calls and never quite gives you his full attention).

However, I am always telling the kids that unfulfilled desires build character. (THAT'S what you call this pain and resentment swelling within my head!) Really, I guess, it's how we respond to unfulfilled desires that build character, or perhaps that response is how our character reveals itself. Anyhow, my character, or that of my household, is less gracious and unflappable than I could wish.

Hmm. I sense a resolution brewing.

Friday Favorites

2010-12-10T12:54:00.003-07:00

I was out of town for work at the start of this week, and even though it was only three days it somehow felt like three weeks and now I'm really just running on made-up time, or so it feels. Like I'm going to look down, Wil E Coyote-style, and realize that ohmygod I forgot to feed the kids. Or holyshit Christmas is TODAY and we haven't even put up our lights. (We HAVEN'T put up our lights.) (But I did make the kids breakfast, and I'm reasonably sure they're at school). So I'm playing mental catchup, here. But I'll still put up a quick favorites post:

1. Favorite holiday: Christmas. Yes, it is, for real. And you know what else? My second favorite holiday is Easter. Old curmudgeonly, nonChristian, hasn't-belonged-to-a-church-in-over-thirty-years me.

2. Favorite part of my commute: where the highway goes down into the Platte River valley and for a mile or so all you can see are cottonwoods, plains, and mountains.

3. Favorite part of traveling for work: the food. Also, making coffee in my hotel room while I take a shower. Also, check-in. Otherwise I kind of hate it, I'm finding.

4. Favorite thing to dream about: landscape. Those dreams where I'm just setting forth into a new a tangled country, either on foot, or more rarely, in a truck. The world in my dreams seems vast and unpopulated. Lately the land in my dreams has been covered with houses, or is platted to be covered with houses, or is not very far from a large population center. Hmm. Coincidence? Or living in the suburbs with little chance to leave them? [Interestingly and perhaps ironically, my second-favorite dream involves looking at real estate.]

5. Third favorite thing to dream about: my grandpa's house. Always in these dreams there is an undiscovered room or floor filled with fascinating things. Two nights ago, however, I dreamed I was in his house and needing to pee, but every room I went to had been demoed. Apparently we were undertaking a "quick" bathroom remodel during our visit to his house. (I wonder where THAT dream came from?)

In other news, we have drywall, folks. Once we get rid of the drywall dust, the house will be downright habitable. Who NEEDS a kitchen, really?

A bit of a change

2010-11-29T12:34:00.003-07:00

This was my Thanksgiving, 2010:

1. Woke up (late!) in a rented condo.
2. Had a leisurely breakfast cooked in the condo kitchenette.
3. Had some more leisure time, audially decorated by three v. excited children.
4. Donned eighteen layers of snow and cold protection, in as leisurely a fashion as such an activity allows.
5. Went skiing en famille. Despite the inevitable bouts of screaming, the disappointment at low-bar goals unmet (I always begin a day of skiing hoping to ride the lift at least five times, and am always laughed off the mountain by fate), the cold, the inopportune demands for food, drink, or bathroom breaks, the day was lovely and made lovelier by the thought of a steaming warm dinner to come.
6. Went back to the condo and helped my SIL prepare Thanksgiving-in-a-box (turkey, gravy, rolls, three sides, cranberry sauce, and a pumpkin pie). My role was primarily confined to rereading the directions and confirming that, yes indeed, you left the plastic bag on the turkey to bake.
7. Ate said dinner, watched a movie with the kids, got to bed by 9 pm.

Nice, right? It's a bit of a departure from our usual Thanksgiving, although the past few years have been a steady exercise in the art of letting good traditions go. I haven't cooked a Thanksgiving dinner since 2007 and I don't think I've made a pie since well before that (and for so many years I was dedicated to the making a pie that began with an uncooked pumpkin and a pile of flour and ended with something that was definitely different than what you could get at King Soopers, but not necessarily better). We hastily dropped the midday-meal tradition after the Family Fiasco of 2008 (it involved plate pushing and bread throwing by a seven-year-old who'd just moved and changed schools, was expected to endure the guarded tensions of having both divorced grandparents at the same event, and broke when asked to come to the table at 2 p.m.) (the fiascality of the tantrum was enhanced by a certain relative, who, instead of a gentle comment about how children are such sensitive instruments or, perhaps, a hearty laugh, commented acidly that she found his behavior "very disturbing" and that, furthermore, I ought to be careful--someone might call social services if they found out he preferred to sleep on the floor.) (GOD) Thanksgiving has always been about friends and family, and it will definitely continue to be--but sometimes it's nice to have it be about family members who actually enjoy each others' company.

Anyhow. While I might tweak with this year's formula a little--by adding some brussels sprouts, maybe, or remembering to pack some whipped cream--I think we've found ourselves a new tradition.

Grateful, Part 1

2010-11-22T08:44:00.003-07:00

My to-do list for the weekend:

1. Make Silas take the floor lamp out of the treehouse;

2. Clear out the old tomato vines;

3. Clean the house (or what is cleanable, anyway).

Not bad, eh? (Also: success. My life is so much easier when I give myself to-do lists that are actually possible to accomplish.) (Although, as easy as Item # 2 seems, the years I actually manage to do this before it snows and the rotting garden becomes encased in ice for the duration of the winter are rare.)

In all it was a lazy weekend, by which I mean we had relatively few things scheduled and M could actually say to me "I'd just kind of like to do NOTHING for a while today" and he could actually do that. Sort of. The state of our lives right now meant that M got to "do nothing" only while playing North American Animal Memory with Helen and overseeing a noisy game of Spongebob Monopoly between Silas and his friend and that these activities took place in our bedroom.

(I was on a run, by the way. Later I got to "do nothing" while sorting laundry and gently reminding small people to please bring their toys back to their own rooms and also planning the meals for the week. I think I planned the meals, anyway. Somehow dinner still ended up being spaghettios, donuts, and store-prepared salad. I SWEAR I will get back to eating well, or well-er, when we have a kitchen. UGH.)

Well, it's Thanksgiving week. I was all set to do a daily post about the things I am thankful for, except that it turned out that enumerating online the things for which I am thankful was the mental equivalent of stating online that no one in the house has thrown up lately or that the kids aren't having sleep issues. In other words, I can't bring myself to do it for fear of the hex. So, instead, I will say: I am so, so very grateful. I am grateful that we are in a position that we could do something about the mold and the ants. I am grateful that we are able to go into debt with a reasonable hope of getting out of it again. I am grateful that I am able to think of money as something abstract, most of the time.

Inching

2010-11-15T11:57:00.009-07:00

The past few weekends have devoted almost exclusively to Stuff Management, a term that will be familiar to anyone with children (or anyone with stuff, although children seem to cause an inordinate and staggering amount of it to pour into the house). Unpacking, sorting, organizing, discarding, and, oddly, repeating (it's like the stuff packs itself up while I'm not looking.) However, after this weekend I feel like we really, truly have Made It, and the stuff is in its place and will remain so for the time being. The doors are back on, the kids' rooms are in order, the summer clothes have been sorted and put away or given away, the hats and coats have been exhumed and put where we can both access them and put them away. Hooks are up. Curtains are up. It feels possible that we might be able to live uncomplicatedly for a while, or at least as uncomplicatedly as it is possible to live when the cooking activities are being conducted from the garage and half the house is still a barn.

In a lot of ways I like the coziness of our current arrangement. We all eat dinner in our bedroom; we watch movies together here, the kids do homework, and M dispiritedly works away on his laptop. Lately I've been preparing dinner here, too, bringing the vegetables and compost tub and only dashing out to adjust the heat on the hot plate when I absolutely have to. On Saturday night I fixed a salad while some tortellini cooked in garage, and then we ate it while watching Where the Wild Things Are. We do our arguing over money and contractors here, too, and it helps that the files, digital and paper, are all an arm's length away ("How much did that glider cost? Well, let's find out!") Well. It sort of helps. Sometimes it's a little too cozy. Also, I still manage to forget what I was going to do between walking to the computer to go look up the kids' online school lunch account and actually sitting down in front of it with my fingers ready.

We try to get out as much as we can, although that isn't always possible.

This weekend, though, I did get away for a little bit, to attend Jess's baby shower. I kind of love baby showers, even when I don't really know anybody, like at this one. I mean: babies. What's not to love? And it was lovely to meet so many other women, and eat some delicious food, and just generally sit around in someone else's house and not worry about my own, for a while.

Another holiday down

2010-11-03T14:44:00.007-06:00

I'm feeling a bit gloaty on this morning after election day--all six of the statewide races/ initiatives that I really, really cared about went my way, and most important, we don't have a racist buffoon for a governor (so there, officemate-who-insists-on-talking-loudly-on-the-phone-about politics-while-I-am-trying-to-quietly-mind-my-own-business). Perhaps M's job in publicly funded higher ed is safe after all.

Of course, my gloating is tempered, as it always is, by the lingering existence of actual problems. Some of them are potentially solvable. Some aren't. I still kind of believe that there isn't much that the people in office can do, most of the time. Still: cheers. I raise my glass, from the comfort of home.

Which means: yes, we're finally home. (Hurray.)

Now with pictures

2010-10-23T21:16:00.008-06:00

I hesitate to post these, since they seem so depressingly unchanged, but behold, our house after two months of renovation:

The kitchen will be to the right of that wall.

Our bipolar house. Half the time it's solid brick, the other half it's crazy window time.

This part looks better.

This part too, although I think the main attraction is external.

Here's Si's room. He doesn't really get why we're dragging our feet on the move-in.

The opposite of fall

2010-10-21T11:45:00.002-06:00

For sundry and assorted reasons, none of which, unfortunately, have to do with moving back into the house (an event that remains depressingly lodged in the future), I have not felt up to posting. I still don't, really, but I am tired of staring "Doggy Bags" in the face every time I open up this blog.

In the blogless interim, however, I HAVE felt up to doing other things, including but not limited to:

1. Sanding down assorted bedroom doors. Our house has very nice, solid wood doors. The previous owner had very anxious, insistent dogs that were often closed into the bedrooms. Need I say more? There's a delicious feeling of exorcising the last of the house demons as I rub those scratch marks into oblivion.

2. Celebrating our 14th anniversary at Rioja, one of those fancy downtown restaurants whose menus read like short stories involving collisions of luxury ingredients (Alaska-caught halibut in an Earl Gray-Tarragon reduction with lemon cream fraiche and a fig tartlet) (which was delicious). Pretentious, yet mmmmm.

3. Receiving rather handsome T-shirts from our builder (although the shirts have the alarming motto "It's not our fault!" written on the back). I'm hoping this isn't one of those "I took out a second mortgage and moved out of my home and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" situations.

4. Finishing the fall baseball season with Silas (thank GOD. No more long haul missions to distant fields.)

5. Finishing untold piles of homework with the same. Eegads, the HOMEWORK. It's more than I had in many college classes. The boy continues to soldier on, bravely and stoically, but sometimes it breaks my heart. M offers a refreshingly different perspective, however--he says that when he lived in Germany in fourth grade, his homework loads were similar. Weekdays were for doing homework, and only weekends were for playdates.

6. Being dazzled by the autumn colors. This happens every year. All year I remember, intellectually, that autumn is very pretty, and then every year I amazed again at the incandescent yellows, the burning reds, the glittering grasses, the way a tepid vista of green and brown is suddenly spiced into brilliance, and everyday acts, like driving to pick up the kids or going for a disappointingly short run, become miracles of hope and beauty. (Why hope, though? I don't know.)

Doggy Bags

2010-10-07T10:21:00.004-06:00

Everyday life is easier than it was two weeks ago, for which I am grateful. Nevertheless, the simple mechanics of daily life--particularly the mechanics of getting the kids out the door with the correct items each and every day--are pretty much absorbing my entire brain space right now. We have friends that we have not seen or contacted in weeks, for which I feel a pang every time I remember them. We have new friendships that were just beginning when we started work on the house, and these friendships have pretty much been shelved for the time being. Although I can't help but notice that other families with multiple children in sports (the only families we see currently, as they are sharers in our current all-consuming hobby of Getting the Kids Out the Door With the Correct Items) seem also to be completely absorbed in their daily mechanics with little room left for socializing or making new friends. And these people have functional kitchens. So I can't blame it all on the house.

However, I can blame one of my latest preoccupations on the house: the need to find and hold onto good doggy bags. Not the food kind. My MIL's house has no fence and no real turf space to call its own, which means that Costi needs to be leashed up, walked, and scooped at least twice a day. This activity involves a lot of poop bags, and I'm constantly fretting about running out. Especially since I don't actually take her on walks in places that provide bags (she's getting old, and prefers not to walk far, and while I suppose I could load her into the car and drive her to an open space nearby...well, see the paragraph above. The planets might align to allow such an activity maybe once a week, at best. Meanwhile, her intestines keep working.) So I'm always dashing out to get the company paper at work, so I can strip off the encasing plastic and stuff it in my pocket. I'm always furtively tugging doggy bags from the stands set up in the neighborhood walkways around my work. I'm always pausing in my predawn runs to pull a few bags from the trails in the neighborhoods beyond the golf course (this is complicated by the fact that I adhere to a doggy bag karma: use only what you need, so that when you really need it, bags will be there. So I can't stock up.)

See? Brain space.

Life on a Golf Course

2010-10-04T08:15:00.002-06:00

It so happens that we are living on a golf course. This is funny in many ways, the funniest of which being the fact that none of us play golf in any way (except for mini golf. A few of us are very enthusiastic about mini golf. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we are not living on a mini golf course.) Even my MIL, whose house it is, does not play golf--which is a good thing, since, as you may know, golf is not cheap (not even when you live on a course, as it turns out), and living on a course you could not afford to play on would be awfully bitter.

However, there are a lot of things to like about living here. As the entrance gate swings shut behind you and you drive from the clubhouse to your house that is only a LITTLE bit like a dormitory room, the road swings up and over a lovely swell, with a great view to the east and west, over closely-shorn parkway, with a beautiful shaggy willow creek running through the middle. There's a pond, with cattails and ducks. All of the painfully tidy houses open onto green space (even if that green space is only about ten feet wide). It's very tranquil out here. Especially when all of the visiting grandkids have gone home. Ahem. It's very safe. And it's very...how shall I say this?...free from the sorts of aggravations that come with living in other, less regulated places. No loud music. No free-roaming cats. No unleashed dogs or uncleaned poo. No unsightly yards or driveways. The homeowners' regulations, coincidentally, read a bit like a list of somebody's pet peeves (one of the rules says that if you put a non-American flag in your flag-bracket [ALL of the houses have flag brackets], you must also have an American flag up, and the American flag needs to be on top).

So...pretty much the four of us (plus our frequently unleashed dog) stick out like a passel of unwelcome gypsies. Every time the gate closes behind me I glance furtively at the houses on either side and sink a little lower in my seat. Every time I run through the neighborhood on my morning jog I feel like an interloper, like I need to say loudly to everyone who cheerfuly greets me that we are ONLY here for really, a FEW more days, we should be GONE by next weekend, I SWEAR it.

And actually? This might be true. The hardwood is going down in our bedroom as I write. By this weekend we may be moving back in. Still no kitchen, but man. It will be nice to be home.

Misplaced Persons

2010-09-29T09:14:00.003-06:00

I stop by the house three or four times a week--I water the plants, I pick tomatoes, I get the mail, I check on the progress of the floor/ framing/ etc. The kids come with me and get stuff from their rooms or they sit in the car and do homework or they hop around in the front yard, peering up and down the street for signs of their friends. I do this a little bit, too. Then I sigh wistfully and think how this was such a great neighborhood when we used to live here.

Then I remember: oh yeah, I still DO live here. Sort of.

After only a week and a half at my MIL's I feel like we've moved out. The house is so gritty and beat down that it is not at all a pleasant place to be (and oh, the yard, it is in a dreadful shape, white and baked and dry). But I miss being able to walk to the library and the store. I miss being five minutes from the kids' school. I miss my running routes. I miss talking to all the neighbors, even the ones who irk me just a little bit.

The house is progressing. The hall and bedrooms have black tarpaper down (I guess this is what they put between the subfloor and the floorboards.) The laundry room has hardiback subfloor, ready for tile. The front room is promisingly filled with bright new yellow lumber. Progress is on the horizon.

But meanwhile I wake every morning in a tidy white duplex on a golf course, go for a run beneath the stars, wave at the active 55s-and-over who wave back ever so slightly accusingly (aren't you and your children what we moved here to get AWAY from? uh, probably so.) I walk Costi on the lush green lawns and when I scoop her poop into the bags, as often as not a little crinkly crabapple leaf sneaks in too. It's starting to be fall, and I long to be home.

Monday treatments

2010-09-20T13:47:00.002-06:00

I guess that TECHNICALLY this is a Typical Monday.

I.e., my mind was a raging forest fire of stress last night and the Jetta has a flat* and thus I had to drive M to the train station so that we could both get to work today, which, as this is my early day, meant that we both had to leave by seven (ha), which, bless my MIL's heart, meant that she would take the kids to school, so that in order to keep her from having to go far above and beyond the call of duty, meant that the kids had to be out of bed, dressed, combed, and fed before we left.

The feat was accomplished, though, and with a minimal amount of crying/ hissing, even if the kids were both lying on their backs waving their arms and legs in the air like drowsy pink pillbugs when we walked out the door. So that was good, and un-Mondayish. And I have a new-to-me espresso maker in my office with me today: also un-Mondayish (although I am still perfecting the ratio of grounds to water). However, the most important thing: today is not yesterday, and for that I am glad.

Yesterday, inspired by a vague charitable impulse, I decided to drive to Fort Collins with the kids. Si could do a playdate with his old friend from first grade, Helen could...tag along, and I could pick up my MIL from the memorial service she was attending and drive her home. Furthermore, that would put the four of us out of the house for half the day so that M could get some work done. Win-win-win, right? Except that in my misty-eyed bumbling charitableness, I sort of forgot about me, and how there was very little in this long-ass thankless drive for me, and how such imbalance, while perhaps good for my soul, is not at all good for my mood. In painful addition, Helen was coming off a sleepover with a friend from her preschool whom she hasn't seen for several weeks. So: two quarreling kids, a long-ass drive, a sense of martyrdom, and vexation that I wasn't even doing something that anyone had asked me to do but had actually brought this all upon myself.

Yeah. It was a long drive. We weren't even out of Denver proper before I'd started to rant about money. The drive back was even longer and I actually pulled over (into a gas station, not by the side of the highway) at one point to clear my head and also show the kids I was serious about not provoking/kicking/screaming/pinching/tattling. ("How about I buy them some McDonalds?" offered my MIL at this juncture, which I angrily refused, a sort of compressed display of 75% percent of our conversations on child-rearing/ life). Ugh. I felt like a bully-mother-martyr--a person who has her place but certainly wasn't why I'd planned the outing in the first place.

On the positive side, though, Si got to see his old friend, and while they're sort of obviously growing apart, he still laughs more with this old friend than with any of his newer friends. They spent the last half of the afternoon telling each other gross-out jokes and laughing hysterically. Also, did I mention my espresso machine in my office? Now I just need a breadmaker (set to "muffin") and a comfy couch for naps, and I wouldn't have any reason to leave.

*We've apparently fallen into a Bermuda Triangle of brokenness.

Officially Out

2010-09-17T10:38:00.004-06:00

So, we spent the night at MIL's surprisingly spacious duplex last night, and let me just how relaxing it was NOT to come home to the house in its state of deconstruction. No dust, no odd smells, minimal arguing about what new problem cropped up today or what old problem needs to be fixed immediately. Supposedly the builders were at the house late into the night, sealing off vents and things; however, I was blissfully unaware of what they were or were not doing. I feel very rested this morning, and sort of Zenlike about the money stuff (for example, if all of our money is embedded in the house, no one can steal it! except that we could steal it from ourselves, by moving too soon or not replenishing...anyway, perhaps the Zenlike part is not thinking about it too hard).

Sleeping arrangements, at the MIL's: M and I in the (windowless) basement bedroom, which is amazingly dust free. Helen on a Helen-sized futon on the floor, with her water and her stuffed snoopies tucked under a towel beside her. Costi on the floor. Since she can't fit under the bed (that's where she prefers to sleep at home), she put her front paws and head under the bed. Silas, by adamant choice, is sleeping on a small futon in the unfinished basement storage room with his music, two (!) fans, and his stuffed dog.

So far, so good. M said when he and the builders pulled up the carpet in our bedroom there was a quarter-inch encrustation of dirt and mold under a pathway from the door to the bathroom. I'm beginning to think that carpets=many of our problems, esp. allergy-related problems. Thus, hardwood floors: attractive, and also a medical investment! Hopefully.

Maintaining the organism

2010-09-13T08:05:00.003-06:00

I've been doing a lot lately of what I call maintaining the organism. Other people might call these coping strategies. Still other people might call this Giving Yourself a Whole Lot of Extra Work and Why Don't You Slow Down Already. But, here are some of the ways I'm trying to stay sane:

1. Exercise, but not too much. My big run on Sunday is only five miles and my weekly runs veer toward 2-and-a-half miles, which previously I didn't really consider a real run (three miles, though: THAT's real.) I walk more. While I've never been a real striver in the exercise department, I'm letting myself take it more easy than before.

2. Eat well, but allow more treats. There's nothing that restores the mind and body quite like a coffee milkshake, after all.

3. Fancy touches. I haven't yet started putting garnish on the dinner plates, but I feel like I'm putting in extra effort to make the dinner table, which is also the countertop and the dishwashing area, LOOK nice. This isn't my usual way. I've also been sweeping the back porch more, even though we hardly ever use it, since it's miles away through a grit-encrusted wasteland right now.

4. Packing ahead. My lunch, the kids' lunches, the kids' backpacks--sometimes I'll stay up until 10:30 getting everything ready for the next day/ week. I'm not sure how much grief this really saves in the morning, but it does help me feel more or less on top of and in touch with the kids' school lives.

5. Cleaning. I've become a bitchy bear about making everyone (ie the kids) clean the living space every night.

Does this stuff help? A little. A lot, actually, but it's of much less value when dealing with having to move everything into two rooms and seal them up. I spent all Sunday moving books, clothes, and boxes, and still, there is so much left to do, and nothing gets underway until we've finished--it's exhausting.

Positives: on Saturday our building guys tore out the nasty gritty allergenic carpet from the kids' rooms, and Si's room has a really beautiful hardwood finish (which he keeps firmly reminding us he wants to have covered up again with carpet as soon as possible). Helen's room also has hardwood, although not in as nice condition.

Also on Saturday, Helen and I drove up to Fort Collins and visited with an old friend who has a daughter Helen's age, and it was so nice, to just sit around drinking coffee, playing with her baby and talking. This is something that doesn't happen as much as it should in our new life.

Wormhole of Suck

2010-09-10T09:36:00.003-06:00

So, we are entering the wormhole of suck phase of the renovation. Half the house is destroyed, entering or exiting the house involves either a) the garage door (which BROKE last weekend and had to be REPLACED even though it is two years old) or b) a dusty, gritty, possibly toxic tiptoe through a hanging sheet of plastic and the wrecked part of the house. Unpleasant, and although it has been only two weeks it feels like forever. Also, M is violently allergic to the drywall dust/ mold/ something growing outside and hasn't been able to sleep, breathe, see, or eat properly for about a month. Also, washing the dishes takes approximately 60 minutes every night. All yuck, but all relatively survivable (especially for me, since I'm not allergic). Then yesterday we got the results of the testing for a toxic substance that I'm reluctant to name publically (there are rumors that the local city will descend upon homeowners E.T.-style and temporarily condemn the house), but let's just say the substance is synonymous with 50s and 60s futuristic homebuilding and also that it's fireproof.

We're positive. Or the house is, anyway. We considered sneaking away in the dead of night and never coming back, but jettisoned that for the much less stressful complete emptying of the house while the vents are sealed, carpets are removed, the offending substance is removed along with the floor and/or subfloor, and then the floors are replaced and the whole thing is cleaned and sterilized. Oh, and also? Everyone involved has to sign waivers so if they develop symptoms of exposure to the substance in twenty years they can't SUE us.

Kill me NOW.

So yes, we are now entering the wormhole. Although what M and I are MOST dreading is the relatively mundane moving of boxes--everything we own has to go into a pod or a sealed room. UGHHH. I am SO SICK of moving (2008--we moved two households. 2009--we moved M's mom's household. 2010--apparently we are moving OUR household. Goal for 2011--NO MOVING ANYONE).

Demolition Derby

2010-09-01T17:17:00.004-06:00

So! We are officially down to the studs. Some stop action photography:

Day 0:
Day 1:

Day 2:
Day 3 (or so):
Helen is standing approximately where the kitchen used to be.

We've started on the journey to the new kitchen. Somewhere in the mists of the future lie the ability to wash our dishes in hot water at a sink, fill the dishwasher, and stand at the kitchen counter making a pie that we can put in our own oven. In the meantime, we're on the hot & crowded 24-hour flight to Guam. Or maybe the four-month journey in the hold of the steamer.

You know what I want?

2010-08-27T11:01:00.003-06:00

A kindie-cam. I would totally have it open on my browser all day long. I could check in on Helen any time I wanted, plus I'd finally have an answer when I ask "what'd you do at school today?" besides a glowering "I don't want to TELL you."

Okay, fine, I'd also like a fourth-grade cam.

Although the potential for abuse would be high. For example: "I noticed you were poking around in your desk when your teacher was trying to explain fractions to the class today. What's up with that?" or "I saw that you laughed when K made that mean comment about your classmate. How do you think that made him feel?"

Two more things

2010-08-25T17:45:00.005-06:00

1. Today was Helen's first day of school. She was beyond excited (I was beyond excited, even though I'm not convinced it's THAT big a milestone; the transition to middle school looms larger right now. Or maybe that's just first child bias). Both kids are starting to devolve a little from "excited" to "violently grumpy." Although, thanks to a house filled with plastic sheeting and drywall dust, I'm having a lot of luck in farming them out for playdates and currently I am in the house ALONE. (Someday soon it will be payback time, and I have a feeling I'd better start thinking of favors to do NOW.)

2. I met Jess today! She's just as beautiful and sensible as she appears in her blog.

I also went for a hike today, at a state park out on the plains that I'd never been to before. Tomorrow I go back to work. I don't dread going back to work, exactly, but that just seems like another person, that self of mine who gets up early and goes for a run and packs a lunch and gets in the car to drive to work. (And that self's life is not exactly exciting. Nor is it leisurely, which is what I crave right now, alas.)

The idea of routine is appealing, however. We've reached the point of no return in the renovation: our drywall is gone. The front of our house looks like a barn, with pink panther fiberglass batts in place of stalls, and a smell of dust and mold instead of straw and manure. I have this naive belief that if I can just cobble together some kind of routine I can ride out all the dust and disruption with smiling equanimity.

Fall beginnings

2010-08-24T12:54:00.009-06:00

Two things:
1. School has started. For Silas, anyway. Helen starts tomorrow. The kids are like little ADD mice on crack, they are so excited.
Silas rips open his backpack to do his homework, talking full speed while he's doing it--"Even though it says just one thing we're supposed to have five things and that's what she said, so it's okay, five things, okay mom?"--and halfway through one assignment he rushes off to do something else (pee, maybe? it would appear to be necessary) and then gets distracted on the way back and ten minutes later I find him in his room, putting together kid kinnects, except that then his attention falls on the Garfield book beside his bed and he drifts off to read it. Meanwhile, Helen has apparently not played with anyone in seven years, she is so desperate to play with Silas, and she lies resentfully on his back while he tries to read, and then, when he says he will play with her after he's read ten pages, lies beside him, singing a little song about how he'll play with her soon, soo-oon, oh ye-ahh. I finally have to call her off.

2. The rolloff is here. So far we have lost the basement drywall. Full speed ahead!

We've also retreated into the south half of the house. Our bedroom has pretty much every electronic device we own in it, including the coffee maker ("It'll be like a hotel!" I said. "We can brew coffee while we're taking a shower!") It also has about half our furniture. The rest is in the garage, which is set up with the kitchen table, some shelves, and the fridge. The distance between the fridge and our bedroom, in other words, is about fifteen feet--it's like we've returned to apartment living. Now, while I am as excited as anyone else in the household for the project to move on through and END (and I will be much, much more excited once the kitchen is gone and we have no faucet or drain for cleaning up dishes), I kind of like this phase. It's cozy--kind of a circle-the-wagons feeling. Or, actually,it's like the old, old days when Mike & I were living in a truck--we slept within arm's reach of everything we owned. There's something comforting in that.

Bye, bye, tiny kitchen with paint-chipping sawdust-dripping cabinets!

Random assortment No. 2

2010-08-20T11:24:00.004-06:00

1. The Friday favorites list is apparently beyond my blogging skills now.

2. The kids' school registration was last night. We stood in one line for 20 minutes, and then another line for 25 minutes, all so we could turn in our forms and checks and OF COURSE I ran out checks, just like I did LAST YEAR, and after standing in line for 45 minutes and having my blood sugar level drop to just about zero the thought of not being able to pay for whatever the last thing was on time like a responsible parent made me totally panicky. UGH. Although it was nothing a beer afterward couldn't fix.

3. We met the teachers--they're both lovely. I was struggling not to be biased but I was really glad that Helen got the kindergarten teacher who isn't brand new (although I'm sure the new teacher is LOVELY and will be a WONDERFUL teacher).

4. I was surprised at how completely ignorant I was of the fourth-grade teachers. You'd think that after two years I'd have some sense of the school beyond the immediate Silas universe, but nay.

5. Neither child has friends in his/her class. Again, OF COURSE. Although I'm not convinced that Silas really cares about friends, to tell the truth. He seems to have buddies everywhere (and he has buddies in this class) and best friends nowhere and bases his favorite friend of the month on the entertainment options at their house, more or less. I SO DO NOT GET THIS.

6. It's Friday, yet there is no dumpster at the house. Hmm. So apparently no demo today.

End-of-summer blues

2010-08-17T13:18:00.002-06:00

"I better start practicing carrying this," Si says, marching across the living room with his backpack on. "Pretty soon I'm going to be carrying it all the time!"

"Will I be able to ride my bike to kindergarten?" asks Helen, as she straps on her pink Barbie helmet and gets ready for her evening wobble around the neighborhood. (The answer, BTW, is Yes! Only we'll have to leave an hour before school starts because the only thing slower than walking at this point is biking).

"I'm going to take lunch three days a week and on Wednesdays, there's pizza day, so then I'll just get to choose one other lunch," says Silas, and then Helen repeats it, with big eyes, only she makes sure that I remember that she doesn't like pizza.

They're getting revved up for school to start, in other words. We've got piles of brand-new school supplies, we've looked online at the teacher teams for each of their grades, we've talked about the new bus stop, about which before-and-after-school activities we're going to do, and about the fall semester schedule. We've gone through their homework/artwork boxes and emptied them out so they're ready for the onslaught of school projects. We're, uh, going to figure out the back-to-school-clothes situation any day now. They're ready. We're ready. I'm ready.

Except I'm not. I am SAD, and for really no reason at all. I am sad that Helen's daycare/preschool is no longer a place we need to go. I am sad that the bedtime routine no longer involves getting Helen into a swimsuit and remembering to put her undies and towel into her swim bag (both my kids prefer to streamline the morning routine by putting their clean clothes on the night before). I am sad that Si's camps are done, even though they were really vast sinks of inconvenience and he didn't even like them all that much (except for archery. He LOVED archery). I am sad that the summer hourglass is down to its last few grains and we've only gone camping ONCE and hiking TWICE and haven't even made popsicles or used our ice cream maker. I am HEARTBROKEN that Silas is practically in middle school (fourth grade! it's crazy! every year a new grade!) I am sad, or perhaps a better word is sorry, that we didn't schedule our summer better. (For the record, next year we will concentrate on doing camp and swim lessons in June, trips in July, and maybe rely on parents and/or whatever late season camps we can find for August. The last few weeks before school starts are scheduling HELL.)

A lot of this sadness, though, is because we're between routines. As soon as school starts and we have our daily and weekly schedules figured out, life will go back to being predictable and calm.

Except, of course, for the renovation. Demo seems likely to begin NEXT WEEK--just in time for school.

Chaos and calm

2010-08-10T06:52:00.003-06:00

On Sunday we celebrated the birthday of this big guy:

Although there was celebrating on Saturday, too, and there will be more tomorrow. It's a five-day party! Or something. Actually, I think it's called "divorced grandparents who want to shower their first grandchild with gifts without the inconvenient presence of the other grandparent plus a separate kid party." Silas doesn't mind--more cakes for him.

We did the kid party at the mini golf in Englewood, the one I like because instead of having dayglo castles and giant neon dinosaurs it has xeric(ish) landscaping and holes that reflect various Colorado tourist destinations. I always leave there trailing slips of paper with hopeful Colorado vacation itineraries jotted on them. Mesa Verde! Cripple Creek! Garden of the Gods!

The rest of the weekend was a stretch of cheerful and indolent chaos, the sort we haven't indulged in since we left Fort Collins. Assorted people trooped in and out of the house all day: their cousin spent the night, one of Si's friends stayed until dinner while his parents went car shopping; some old FtC friends stopped in after dropping their dog at a vet surgery near us, and later Si's friends' parents stayed to talk about the frustrations of car shopping and the scary-but-okay accident that had necessitated it in the first place. And then on Sunday we hung out at my MIL's, eating waffles and fruit while the kids played. I dug in her garden, pulling out old iris roots, and then we all went to her pool before it was time for Si's baseball practice. Later, she and her boyfriend came over for dinner and dessert. A busy, social weekend that still felt homebody-ish: my favorite kind. Although by Monday I was ready for a little more regulation and routine and it was kind of a relief to get back to work.

The kids start school in two weeks! Helen starts kindergarten in two weeks! We're all a little anxious and excited.

Assortment

2010-07-30T13:10:00.003-06:00

1. We have been bribing the children lately, to great success. The promise of four little chocolate chips was enough to get Helen to ride her bike (with training wheels, of course) somewhere besides the garage--and after less than a week, she's asking me if we can go on a bike ride after dinner. "Absolutely!" I always say. "Let me get my shoes on." Si is harder in this department--even as a baby he would narrow his eyes in the face of a parental proposition as he performed a detailed cost-benefit analysis--but if the price is right, he'll usually go for it (running! times tables! showers!)

2. I'm wondering how to get bribery to work on MYSELF. I have a horrible bad habit--it's called the internet--and I am determined to get my life back. Or at least my daytime productivity. Based on my faith that if you do something for ten days it becomes a habit (or is it two weeks? ANYWAY, some manageable amount of time), I am strictly rationing my (cough at work cough) internet time. After ten days, hopefully it will be habit. After a month, I'm thinking that I should get some sort of reward. Only, what? Ooh! I know! A major house renovation! Oh, right. We're getting that anyway, AND it's using up all our money.

Maybe I could give myself some chocolate chips (only, again, that would involve an interim time of NOT giving myself chocolate chips, which would mean that instead of embarking on one self-improvement project, I'd have to manage two--and, well, that's just too much self control right now. Especially when I don't have a kitchen.)

3. Actually,we do still have a kitchen, but its days are numbered. Also, all of our couches have gone into hiding. Now we just sit on cushions on the floor, waiting for the contractor to come.

Dilemma and advice

2010-07-27T16:54:00.002-06:00

I have a kid friendship question. Only I've pretty much already answered it in my own mind, so it's not really a question so much as fishing for reassurance.

Here's the deal: there's a kid in Si's class who has called him a couple of times this summer asking to play. He's never gotten through to Si personally; once he (actually, his dad, who was calling for him) talked to me; once he left a message. Si has been informed of these messages and has been nudged to call back, but he has shown zero interest in returning this kid's calls. Negative interest, even.

My normal position on Silas's social life is that I keep out of it. (Which is a separate question in and of itself: how much should I be interfering/ directing/ shaping Si's friendships?)

However, as the message-taker, I feel responsible. Also, I feel bad for the guy in his class. My sense is that he is not well-liked. Rumors get spread about him. All things being equal (when are they ever equal, though?) I think I would nudge Si a little harder about calling him back.

However--and here is where the water gets murky--I have a gut reaction toward this guy, and it is negative. I've been in Si's class. The kid is a little out of control. Also, I get reports like "people don't like X because he gets really mad and kicks people" and "X says he plays Nintendo until 3 a.m. and his parents just let him." Also, his parents: they are divorced, and his dad has clearly remarried a trophy wife. They seem like uncomfortable, dissipated people. This is based solely on gut instinct, meaning on sheer surface prejudices. I don't like that I do this. Nevertheless, it is the data with which I am working.

My charitable instincts (give the poor kid a chance) are at war with my parental instincts, which tell me this kid, however pitiable his home life, is unlikely to be a good influence. He's likely to engage in questionable behaviors in a playdate at his house and need extra supervision at a playdate at our house.

More data: I am myself a few-close-friends sort of person, not an embrace-a-wide-and-diverse-acquaintanceship person. I don't pursue or encourage friendships with women I don't like or don't trust. And I don't feel right pushing my children to do so, either. I try to enforce a rule of kindness, but there is a difference between being breezily polite/ friendly in a neutral location, like school, and inviting someone into your house.

I feel bad. But I'm not going to do it.

Stuff I'm Glad About Today

2010-07-23T13:35:00.002-06:00

1. I've been exercising with arm weights and various fitness videos every morning, which is something I persist in even though it makes me feel hatefully perky. While I cannot tell, from looking at my fainting-Victorian-lady upper arms, whether I have been building any muscle, I do feel more...square? More aligned? Like, when I go up the stairs, I notice that my knees are pushing out right over my toes, etc. Like my day-to-day form is better. Or I'm more conscious of it. Either way, I like it.

2. After I wrote yesterday's post, I reflected on some of the other differences between now and five years ago. The two biggest ones are these: I finally have a more-or-less real job (if nothing else, proving that this is a human activity I am capable of), and life with the kids has hit the sweet spot. Right after Silas was born, one of my professors said something like "The next few years will be terrible, then they will be great for about eight years or so, then they'll be terrible again, and then they'll be great." So far we seem to be sticking to this trajectory, slightly extended due to adding another small person to the mix. While upon rare occasion I miss those babies I used to have, most of the time I am luxuriating in my ability to do basic normal things, like take a bath alone, or read at breakfast, or drink a cup of coffee without leaping up five times to attend to someone (although this still requires frequent semipatient reminders that I will do X when I'm done with my damn coffee, please). We can go on hikes and watch movies together. We can do trips. I can read chapter books to both of my kids. Life is pleasant, except when tainted by future longing (i.e., when I think that five years from now I will have a 10-year-old and an almost-14-year-old, and that the 14-er will probably look at me with loathing, and will be so busy with activities that we'll never be able to leave town, and when we do leave town he will spend the whole time pining after his friends and/or texting them inappropriately and on the sly).

3. We looked at cabinets and countertops yesterday, and I started to be excited that someday relatively soon we are going to have a kitchen that not only works properly but which was specifically chosen and designed by us. As I've never lived with a kitchen that wasn't a morass of compromise and small disappointments, this is a big deal. It also raises uncomfortable questions of resource use and agency and allocation of personal funds--I can no longer be, or pretend to be, the virtuous planetary resident I was when I had a bike and 500 square feet and a monthly budget of $500. Also, that means the disastrous tupperware drawer will be completely our fault.

Five years!

2010-07-22T12:48:00.004-06:00

Even though she claims it is not a meme and was never intended to be one, I'm still totally stealing Flotsam's five-year summary because I like it so much.

Also, I sort of like the idea of randomly turning back and saying--wait! Five years! What was I doing five years ago today?

July 22, 2005 (I checked. It was a Friday.)

1. Working, in my hot office on the CSU campus. Silas was at daycare a few blocks away. Helen was probably in my lap and I was probably typing one-handed.
2. We were sort of starting to recover from becoming a four-person family seven months before.
3. Writing was going okay. I was still on a hiatus from the novel, but I had some other good stuff going on.
4. We were also recovering from our second camping trip as a four-person family. The secret to camping with a seven-month-old? Camp beside a river, so no one can hear her scream.
5. I was ramping up training for my first and so far only half-marathon.

In the intervening years, there have been:

Children conceived: 0
Live babies acquired: 0
Men married: 0
Houses sold: 1
Houses bought: 1
Houses regretted: 1
Books written: 2 (rought drafts only, alas)
Degrees acquired: 0
Unfamiliar countries visited: 1
Unfamiliar states visited: 2 (in addition to lots of familiar states)
Couches owned: 5
Pets felled by disease/neglect: 2 (birds) (I'm also not sure of the turtle's fate, but I fear it was not good)
Days admitted to hospital: 0
Days children admitted to hospital: 3
Literary rejections received: countless
Pounds gained: haven't checked lately
Kidney stones passed: 0
Internships completed: 1
Funerals attended: 1
Books read: 292 (I keep track)
Blogs maintained: 1
Chickens reared: 3

Getting away

2010-07-19T21:15:00.004-06:00

Denver temps, July 15-17, 2010: approximately 150 degrees, at least according to some eyewitness accounts.

Fraser-Granby-Winter Park temps: decidedly not that. Also, it was sunny. Also, so I don't get too weepily nostalgic, the mosquitoes were OUT. Helen looks like she came down with smallpox. (Guess who inherited her dad's inflammatory reaction tendencies?) And I spent at least two hours in the sweltering tent one day because heat stroke was FAR PREFERABLE to one more mosquito bite. Yargh.

Overall, though, the kids loved it. Note that Silas actually carried a backpack! With actual stuff in it! We did manage to convince him not to bring his 25-pound magnetix set, which spent the weekend in the car. Helen also carried a backpack, but her load consisted of a half cup of trail mix and barbie doll clothes.

Si is sometimes less enthusiastic about fishing than his dad would like him to be, but this weekend he even outfished Hubs. Friday morning he came stumbling down from his tent with his fishing pole in one hand and his shoes in the other. "Mom! Can you put my shoes on while I eat breakfast?" he asked.

"But can't you put on your own--oh, fine," I said.

Even our photos feel nostalgic.

Guess where we're going?

2010-07-14T18:46:00.004-06:00

Breakfast:

Lunch:
Dinner:
We're going backpacking. Whoohoo! Slash kill me.

I kid. It should be fun! Although I am kind of looking forward to coming home even before we get there.

Mt Bierstadt

2010-07-05T19:38:00.008-06:00

Happy July! We had a great fourth of July--and, actually, all last week was great, in a tiring, nose-to-the-grindstone sort of way. Hubs was in Alaska last week (jetlag + all-day nights = hel-lo, sleep problems!) but my folks were here, so I would walk in the door at the end of the day and the house would smell like dinner. Then, at bedtime, I would get the kids' teeth brushed and faces washed and then kiss them goodnight and go read my own book while my parents put them to bed. It was HEAVENLY. And for mysterious reasons I was completely flat-out exhausted during the entire week. I think it was like that thing where you're running around, doing one thing after another, busy-busy-busy but keeping up just fine, until you make the mistake of sitting down. Then you're toast.

Then on the Fourth (Hubs was home--yay) we packed our cold weather gear and headed for the mountains. It was overcast and drizzling in Denver but the mountains were beautiful. The kids would like to go on record that they did not APPROVE of doing a hike, but DID IT ANYWAY for the sake of family harmony. Point taken, kiddos.

Helen started off game but wary:

After two solid miles of up, though, she got a little discouraged:

Even if she was, as many passersby noted, the most fashionable hiker on the mountain:

And then after lunch she got to head back down. So she was happy.

Si, on the other hand, was "tricked" and "forced" into climbing to the top:

And if he was maybe a little bit proud that he climbed a whole mountain by himself he certainly wasn't going to let on. Much. My big guy.

Chicken AND the egg

2010-06-25T08:12:00.003-06:00

Oh, my dears. This has been a long week, and for no real reason other than Hubs has been gone. But I can't even complain, because Si has mostly been at his cousin's, so the actual house roll call has been very manageable (or so you would think). As Helen commented the other day, "It's all girls here, right, mom?" Yes. Yes it is. And this Friday morning I STILL feel like the best option would really be to crawl back into bed, only the effort of pulling the covers up over my shoulder seems like it might overwhelm me.

Guess I'll go to work instead.

But! The highlight of the week was hands-down the unexpected visitor we had on Tuesday night, and I wish I had had a camera because the visual of this strutting nervously around on our suburban lawn would be so much better: a chicken. Making very worried chicken sounds. While casually putting various shrubberies between itself and us (those chickens can MOVE).

And best of all, after it had squeezed itself back over to our neighbor's yard where it belongs? I found an egg. Which made me want to unpatch the hole in the fence--come over whenEVER you want, little chicken. WhenEVER you want. Mmm-mm.

Freshening

2010-06-18T08:10:00.003-06:00

I am finding myself in a bit of an ethical quandary. Helen (via her school) made a loving present for Hubs for Father's Day. It involved a drawing of a car, some other stuff, and the store-bought weenie at the present's heart: a car air freshener. We opened the gift last night since Hubs won't be here on the actual day (instead he'll be eating chocolates and cheese in Switzerland, boo-hoo for him) (it's a work trip) ("work" trip). She was so excited to give it to him. And she's so excited to display it--in, oddly, the car I usually drive. And--how shall I put this?--the scent of the air freshener makes me feel like I am getting a nasal root canal. Silas walked around the house with it last night before putting it in the car, and this morning the house still REEKED of the stuff. Not to mention the tide of scent washing into the laundry room from the garage.

"Mmm, it smells so nice!" Helen cried happily this morning, as we pushed our way against the scent into the car. "Don't you like it, Mom? What's your favorite smell?"

"I like...kind of um, natural smells."

"Like banana bread? I don't like banana bread, but I like how it smells!"

"Yes. Banana bread smells wonderful."

So right now I'm trying to figure out the right combination of lie and truth that will spare her feelings but get rid of the damn thing. My personal first choice is "Shoot, honey! I had the window open and it just blew right out onto the highway!" However, for various reasons of tactfulness and sentimentality (it's Hubs' father's day present), I'm leaning more toward needing to "preserve" it. By keeping it wrapped in three sealed bags in the trunk of the car with a blanket wrapped around that and maybe a box over it. After all, the smell of the thing is still nice and strong--if we parcel it out, it should last forever. Just like Helen's love for her dad. Sighhhh.

Happy Friday!

My Child Is an Independent Thinker

2010-06-13T21:11:00.006-06:00

My child is an independent thinker...For example, he knows better than to enjoy doing book reports.

So we got a little letter at the end of the school year letting us know that Silas had been selected for the GT program (I'm calling it GT because the gifted talented program makes me throw up a little in my mouth). This is great, and I'm proud of him, and hope that it will lead to exciting opportunities like being able to read classic children's books in the original and unabridged. Or maybe they do that in all classes now, I don't know. I'm glad, but I'm not really surprised--I mean, Si's smart and he likes school, so duh, obviously he's in the GT program. End of story. See you in the fall.
Exceppttt...they sent home with the letter a little questionnaire to collect "evidence of how you perceive your child's abilities and characteristics." We're supposed to supply examples from our child's own life. Which, reading through it, made me wonder if they'd sent the letter to the wrong parents. Because look at some of these characteristics and abilities:

"My child is a 'self-starter' who works well alone. (For example: After watching a film about musical instruments, Gary began to make his own guitar from materials he found around the garage)." [really? there are third-graders that DO this?]
"My child will spend more time and energy than his/her agemates on a topic of his/her interest. (For example: Joan is learning to sew and spends every free minute designing new dress patterns and trying to sew them herself.)"

Or my favorite:

"My child is a 'doer' who begins a project and shows finished products of his/her work. (For example: Mary began working on a puppet show four months ago, and has since built a stage and puppets and has written a script. Tomorrow she's presenting her play to the PTA!)"
I mean, these examples immediately make me a) insecure and b) confused (where ARE these children?), not to mention c) sarcastic ("My child is a finisher: he'd stay up til two a.m. every night trying to finish the next level of Mario Brothers II on the Wii if he could).

They also make me wonder if (/hope that) the questionnaire's designed to weed out pretentiousness. Because, seriously, "Tomorrow she's presenting her play to the PTA!" Since when did the PTA have puppet shows? I thought you only went to stuff like that in the service of investing in supporting your kid's activities, for Pete's sake.

Anyhow. I'm still glad. Just...wary.

Update: Project Return Home a success

2010-06-08T15:03:00.003-06:00

Okay, YES, I did make it home on Thursday. However, my escapade apparently left me too tired to post. I'm attempting to rectify that situation currently--the posting, not the tiredness. So, uh, here's my post. In list form, because still with the tiredness.

1. Si's last day of of school was today. Technically I should say "day," since classes dismiss at 10:30 a.m. following a school-wide party (which I'm not faulting them for, because it's hardly like there's going to be meaningful instruction on the last day). Let's have a round of applause for my husband's job, which allows him to work from home in a flex-time situation completely at his own discretion. If we had to do this on two minimally flexy jobs we'd be screwed.

2. Let the party of summer begin. *groan and fall to floor* Last summer was one single three-month fight between me and Si on the subject of how much daily monitor time was appropriate. This year we're doing camps and playdates, so hopefully it will be less of an issue. Also, he's like...more mature, or something, and is actually starting to understand (slash parrot back in a convincing tone of voice) our position re the video gaming.

3. On the party deck tonight...cold lentil salad and Shrek 4.

4. I'm still kind of looking forward to summer. I wish I could participate in it more, though: summer is the time when I really wish I didn't work.

5. We're in the middle of signing papers in which we agree to have the interior of the house gutted, though, so not working/ working less is off the table as an option. I'm actually excited about the remodel, though--in addition to a fancy new kitchen where the drawers don't shake sawdust and paint chips down into our dishes, we're going to have actual insulation in the roof! As opposed the 3-inch soggy fiberglass batts we had before. Already we have some excellent improvements: the house no longer smells like mold, we don't have ants, the rotting soffits and fascia boards have been replaced, AND, since it was cheap and easy (relatively speaking), we had two skylights put in.

So! Have a good Tuesday evening. I'll be thinking of you as I eat popcorn-laced butter product in the air-conditioned dark.

New Year's Resolution #1 Accomplished

2010-06-03T15:51:00.002-06:00

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to ride my bike to work at least once this year. Today I accomplished that resolution. Or, since I'm still at work, I've accomplished 1/2 of that resolution, with no deux ex machina in sight to help me not complete it. (However. It could still rain, and then I would Have To Call.)

Since my house is 12 miles from work as the crow flies, and 14-16 miles as the crow bikes, assuming the crow prefers to avoid hills and major streets just like I do, this is a major undertaking, one which has involved several stages of mental involvement. Here is a summary of those stages:

Stage 1. Preparation. Plotting routes, fretting, packing, tossing and turning in eager anticipation. I usually bring my lunch and purse in several ungainly handbags, so I had to break out the backpack. While I was at it, I packed my lunch (and Si's, and Helen's school swim bag, and I did the dishes, and then I got crabby and stomped around the house feeling put upon and overworked). Duration: approximately 4 days, greatly intensifying in the past 24 hours.

Stage 2. Delight. As I set off this morning (at 6:20), I couldn't stop smiling. The mountains were beautiful. The stormy clouds were beautiful. The early-morning gardens were beautiful. I saw a fox, and people walking their dogs, and big beds of blooming irises, and green meadows. The view in places (I was riding west, toward the mountains) was spectacular. Duration: 45 minutes.

Stage 3: Exhaustion. My legs started to hurt. Everything was uphill. I just wanted to take a break but I couldn't because a) I was already kind of late for work and b) I was right on a busy street and I didn't want to be a total obvious wimp. Duration: 45 minutes.

Stage 4: Grim soldiering on. The last mile was TOTALLY uphill. The only way I could do it and not stop or walk was to count to one hundred, over and over, and also remind myself that this was good exercise. Duration: 10 minutes.

Stage 5: Smug relief and pride. I rode my bike to work! I am so totally badass! Should I put my helmet right on my desk where everyone can see, or should I just announce on the intercom how awesome I am? Duration: 2 or 3 hours, until I realized that nobody actually cared.

Stage 6: Nervousness. How the hell am I going to get home? Duration: 6 hours, to present.

Stage 7: Exhaustion; also, overwhelming desire to take a nap. Duration: hard to tell, since I'm too sleepy to read the clock.

Stage 8: Help me.

Anyway, it's been fun. Hope to make it home.

Technically June 1 is summer don't even argue

2010-06-01T21:15:00.003-06:00

I know, I know, midsummer and official summer are still three weeks off, blah blah blah. But after a LOVERLY weekend, involving swimming pools, a Rockies game, and getting to meet this fantastic lady, I have a sunburn, which means that in my accounting book, it's summer.

Plus, Helen's summer program ("We got two free swims!") started today, and while Si's school isn't officially out, he's totally ACTING like it's out, with the moping and the anxiety-about-change (which I so, so get and am trying to hide in myself so as not to provoke his any more than it is), so I say we just call it done so by the time summer does start he'll be relaxed and happy again. Or something.

Finally, what with all the sucktacious stuff happening around the internet (my heart is breaking for Katie Granju and her family, and I am also technically Scared Shitless about Si's teenage years) and elsewhere, we need us some summer.

Right, yeah? Let's go get us some pina coladas.

Party on the roof! roof! roof! roof!

2010-05-27T21:33:00.001-06:00

Sorry for the barfilicious pic, but now we know: THIS is why the house smells of mold.

Better

2010-05-19T09:07:00.003-06:00

This is mostly what's been making me feel bad: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/kentucky/obituary.aspx?n=kelly-jo-feinberg&pid=142854594. I met Kelly in grad school and while it would be a presumptuous lie to say that we were good friends, she was one of the lights of grad school. We shared an office during the first and only semester that I taught and I remember giggling with her about our insecurities and awkwardnesses and as I've awkwardly tried to write a condolence letter this week to her husband, I keep imagining that I'm going to be able to laugh with Kelly about it--and then remembered, oh. But she was younger and nicer than me and the whole unfairness of it all has been pissing me off.

Anyhow. I am feeling better. Helen had her much-anticipated Kindergarten Orientation last night, and it cheered me right up. I'd feel even better if *I* got to go to kindergarten in the fall, because it sounds so awesome, but luckily I'm good at vicariously living through my kids.

Happy Wednesday.

Sad

2010-05-17T11:59:00.004-06:00

My mood this Monday morning is toeing the "bummed" line, wavering between actual local sadnesses and crises and occasionally veering out into "let's surf the internet and find out what WORSE things could be happening and then imagine them and weep." Occasionally I'm foraying into mad territory--sometimes life steps in and fucks up all your plans and there's nothing you can do about it! This sucks!--and then also into the more midlife crisis-y "so you wanted to be a ranger at Yellowstone National Park and raise your kids to happily roam the woods AND be fluent in Spanish AND physically close to all of the important relatives and look how things turned out instead"--which upon examination looks less like a "life interfered with my dreams" crisis and more of a "reality interfered with my dreams."

Which doesn't actually make the non-actualization of those dreams any less bitter. Plus, there are the actual local sadnesses and crises, none of which are new but which are kind of wearing me down right now.

Anyhow. Apparently it's Monday or something. (*signficant glance at sulking self*)

Friday Favorites

2010-05-14T10:33:00.003-06:00

My oldest threw up on the bus today. Rite of passage, right? Poor kid. (also: guilt. He said he felt dizzy this morning, but did I listen? No.)

Now I'm kind of feeling like sickness lurks around the corner. My throat is...not sore yet, but drippy, if you know what I mean.

So. A Friday Favorites post about the great things about being sick. Because feeling crummy sucks--but it's always nice to have an excuse to glug down some Nyquil (off brand, of course).

1. Sleeping in, taking naps, and more sleeping in general. This really only works if it's not a coughing cold.

2. Watching TV/ movies and feeling like this is good. This is exactly what I should be doing vs Don't you have some laundry you need to do? Only that laundry never goes away, does it? Damn.

3. Nyquil, benadryl, and etc. Duh.

Well, that's it. I hope this isn't a really involved cold. I also hope it isn't a big one for the coughing.

Welp, it's a Thursday

2010-05-13T10:25:00.003-06:00

My head has been otherwise engaged this week, what with a regular storm of craptacular news, the attendant bad sleeping, and, oh yeah, SNOW. In May. Insert Colorado Weather disclaimer here, and I KNOW, it's weather, get OVER it, but still. The low pressure shit is messing with my mood, and there wasn't much of it to be messed with to begin with.

Anyhow. Things are actually going fairly well in the Melospiza household, objectively speaking, and from the perspective of the healing power of self-pity this just doesn't help. I mean, a year ago, if we'd found out that we needed a roof repair to the tune of ten grand, I would have been in red alert panic mode. Now, thanks to being employed, I can say philosophically, "Eh. It sucks, but what can you do?" And, thanks to even worse news out there, even this problem seems small and of the we're-lucky-to-have-it variety. Man. The words "hospice" and "under 40" shouldn't legally allowed to be in the same sentence and I don't want to talk about it but I just want to say that the people involved are about the kindest, funniest, warmest people on the planet and it just SUCKS.

Meanwhile, my son's baseball team continues to lose (but with talent!), we've got ongoing battles with the Wii and exactly how much time should be spent playing it (ranging from a high of 22 hours a day to a low of zero), and half of my daughter's friends are not going to be at her daycare this summer. Although she seems to be dealing with this fact just fine, and we actually have a good history of playdates and parent-to-parent communication with the friends involved, so it isn't nearly the break that it might at first seem (And? she's likely to be at the same middle school as these girls, which is unimaginable and awesome.)

So. It's a Thursday. Enjoy yours.

Boring garden post

2010-05-10T06:37:00.003-06:00

Baby steps: it's not really possible to tell in this picture, but the back yard is looking better.

In the beds: two kinds of peas, three kinds of beans, tomatoes, zucchini, patty pan squash, radishes, carrots, and cucumbers. I *may* have overplanted just a bit.

Also, I'm too tired from working all weekend to post (*lame*). But I will say this: the trailer bike, and Helen's total and utter fear of riding on it and my resulting frustration, may have figured prominently.

Hope y'all have a good Monday.

Melospiza

Under the leaf canopy

Drinking the Spanish

The long-awaited TBR post

Someone is seven

One of my resolutions should be to post more

Tucson to teenager

Ski town, USA

Sunny & cold with a chance of fantasticness

Middle Earth

Pumpkins and more

Change

Falling

Octobery

Corn and other signs of fall

Madame Helen's School for Fine Stuffed Animals

Oh the busy days of now

Friends of the Mosquito Coast

Tom Sawyer and Mary Lennox

First firsts

Three...two...one...

Last days of summer

I survived my son's first sleepover party

Holy Horse, the Kid is Ten

So much to say, so little of note

Camp Report

Friday Favorites: Rain

Now with photos

What is UP with me lately

In defense of fireworks

Brief update

Chore report

Field trip

The one with the dolphins on it

Hawks, meadowlarks and killdeer

Cozy

Mother's Day

We Have a Biker

Spring trip

Landing on Mars

Heading Home

It's a Half Moon!*

I do not like it, Sam I Am

Dislocation

Life with a Fourth Grader

Taking a break from researching TurboTax

Leaping, plus updates

Men who cry

January progress

Ahh, the bowl fight

Dog Ambition

Cleaning

Dilettante

Late-breaking resolution

Update

Resolve: Not Just for Cleaning Anymore

From There to Here

Holiday interlude *edited to add pictures*

Friday Favorites

A bit of a change

Grateful, Part 1

Inching

Another holiday down

Now with pictures

The opposite of fall

Doggy Bags

Life on a Golf Course

Misplaced Persons

Monday treatments

Officially Out

Maintaining the organism

Wormhole of Suck

Demolition Derby

You know what I want?

Two more things

Fall beginnings

Random assortment No. 2

End-of-summer blues

Chaos and calm

Assortment

Holiday interlude edited to add pictures